Hundreds, if not thousands.Originally Posted by Al Burgemeister
Every homebuilt in the registry is a unique airplane; the builder is allowed to name it whatever they wish. This tends to stymie attempts to automatically count aircraft types. To a computer, a "Smith Lancair 4" is NOT the same as a "Jones Lancair IV", and if you try catalog them, you get a lot of one-count aircraft types.
Here's just the first page of my list of EAB aircraft in 2020. Notice the variety of types, and the different ways they're designated.
N-NUMBER 1001A 1001W 1001X 10026 10027 1002C 10039 1003Z 1004Z 1005 10059 1005C 10066 1006Q 1007 1007P 1007Y 1008Z 10091 1009G 1009Z 100BU 100C 100CD 100CS
This means each type needs its own search filters to not only find types that match, but to weed out types that DON'T match but have similar names. DonN's search for Wittman W10s is a good example...it got 103 hits for Wittman W10s, but also a batch of hits for Agusta AW109SPs (W10 buried in the name), DJI SW 1000 drones, Virus SW100s, etc.
I'm guessing Don eliminated them manually...easy enough to do, with a one-time ~120-row result. Not so easy when you're trying to find the results for ~60 different aircraft types, and you rerun the same search in January of each year!
Developing new filters, especially for rarer airplanes, is an adventure. Search the database for "Dyke Delta"? 13 hits. But then I notice that many owners use variations of "JD-2" as a model number. Add that to the search terms, and pow...three more hits.
But one is a Stewart JD2FF. Is that a Dyke? Looking online, no: It's a Foo Fighter. So modify the filters so the plane is excluded.
So...15 Dyke Deltas in the 2020 registry. But three are not listed as having Experimental Amateur-Built certification. So the official number, per my original table, would be thirteen.
It's actually kind of fun to do, a bit of detective work. But it's NOT fun if you're trying to chase down dozens of rarer types with awkward type names. So I go for the lower-hanging fruit; aircraft with many examples, or classics with unique names like the Volksplane.
The advantage is, the filters get saved and copied from year to year and don't have to be re-developed. And I've got the system automated on my PC; it takes me only 3 mouse clicks to invoke all the filters and generate the totals for ~60 homebuilt types.
Ron Wanttaja
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