aircraft-registration-format

Format and identify aircraft registration numbers ("tail numbers") by their ITU/ICAO nationality prefix — e.g. FABCD → F-ABCD (France).

Install

npm install aircraft-registration-format

Usage

import { formatRegistration } from "aircraft-registration-format";

formatRegistration("FABCD");
// {
//   raw: "FABCD",
//   formatted: "F-ABCD",
//   prefix: "F",
//   country: "France",
//   iso2: "FR",
//   iso3: "FRA",
//   flag: "🇫🇷",
// }

formatRegistration("n12345");
// { formatted: "N12345", country: "United States", ... } — no hyphen, by convention

formatRegistration("not-a-registration"); // null

formatRegistration("4Uabc");
// { formatted: "4U-ABC", type: "organization", name: "United Nations", flag: "🇺🇳" }

formatRegistration is case-insensitive, trims whitespace, and strips any existing punctuation before re-formatting, so already-hyphenated input is safe to pass in. The result is a discriminated union on type: "country" entries have country/iso2/iso3/flag, "organization" entries (ICAO, UN, WMO — registrations that aren't tied to a single state) have name and, only for the UN itself, a flag.

Flags

flag is a Unicode flag emoji computed from iso2 — no image files, no network request, works offline. You can also call it directly:

import { getFlagEmoji } from "aircraft-registration-format";

getFlagEmoji("FR"); // "🇫🇷"

Data source

The nationality-prefix dataset (civil aircraft, per country, plus a handful of international organizations) is derived from flydenity (MIT licensed), which itself follows the ITU Table of International Call Sign Series and ICAO Annex 7. See NOTICE.md for full attribution. The dataset is vendored (copied into this repo), not pulled as a live dependency — flydenity has been stable since 2020, and we may hand-edit entries here to fix errors.

For known data ambiguities, edge cases, and other implementation details, see docs/data-notes.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Third-party data attribution in NOTICE.md.