The plane that flew for Jet Airways twice

In 2007 a new Boeing 737-800, serial number 34802, joined Jet Airways as VT-JGU. It flew for Jet for twelve years.

Jet stopped flying in April 2019. A week later, VT-JGU was deregistered. Ten weeks after that, the same airframe was registered again as VT-SXE, this time for SpiceJet.

Then it got stranger. When investors tried to bring Jet Airways back, they needed an aircraft for the proving flights the regulator requires before an airline can launch. In May 2022 they used VT-SXE, painted in Jet colours. The revival never carried a paying passenger. By mid-2023 the plane had left Jet's list again, and today it is back with SpiceJet.

One plane, two names, two airlines, four stints. You can trace all of it, but only if someone keeps the paperwork.

#Nobody keeps the paperwork

India has no open aircraft register. What the DGCA, the aviation regulator, does publish every month is two PDFs: one for airlines and one for charter operators. Each names every aircraft under every permit.

Each list is a snapshot. Next month's PDF replaces it, and the old one is gone. So nobody can easily answer simple questions like "when did this plane arrive?" or "who flew it before?"

vtaircrafts.in is my fix. It reads both PDFs every month and keeps every result. Then it goes back in time: the Internet Archive has saved copies of these files since 2005, and the site parses those too. Today it tracks 1,306 aircraft across 150 operators, and every one has its own page with its full history.

#What 20 years of lists show

#The fleet more than quadrupled

In March 2005, Indian airlines had 180 aircraft on their permits. In August 2026 they have 835. IndiGo alone has 403 of them, almost half.

#Mergers are written into the lists

When airlines merge, their planes move between permits within a few months. Every big Indian airline merger shows up:

#When an airline dies, its planes leave

This was the finding that surprised me. Compare what happened to each airline's fleet:

• Vistara merged into Air India. 71 of its 92 aircraft still fly in India today, with the same registrations.
• Jet Airways collapsed. 186 aircraft passed through its permit over the years. I can only find seven still flying in India, all under new names: five at SpiceJet (VT-SXE is one) and two at Air India Express.
• Go First collapsed in 2023. Of its 83 aircraft, I can find two still flying here, both now with IndiGo.

Most Indian airliners are leased from companies abroad. When an airline fails, the owners take their planes back and fly them out of the country. When an airline merges, the leases carry on and the planes stay. These counts come from matching serial numbers, which DGCA's files don't always print, so treat them as minimums.

#The oldest airliner on the list

The oldest airline aircraft I can date is Blue Dart's cargo Boeing 757, VT-BDN, built in 1992. It's 34 years old and still on the list.

#How it works, briefly

The PDFs are spreadsheets printed to paper. Plain text extraction turns them into soup, so the parser reads each word's position on the page and rebuilds the table from that. A few rules keep the data honest.

Mismatches are recorded, not fixed. Next to each aircraft type, DGCA prints how many it lists. Sometimes the counts disagree: the August 2026 list says IndiGo has 160 A321neos and then lists 140 registrations. The site keeps both numbers and flags the issue rather than guessing which one is right.

Dates are exact or a range, never guessed. If a plane is missing from one list and appears in the next, all we know is that it arrived somewhere in between. So that's what the site says.

Exact dates come from DGCA's separate registration reports. Those reports list serial numbers too, which is how VT-JGU and VT-SXE turn out to be the same aircraft.

A rename is not a sale. Airlines rebrand, and older files truncate names. Without care, a rebrand looks like a whole fleet changing owners overnight. Operator names go through one function that knows the difference.

There's no database. A GitHub Action runs on the 3rd of every month: it downloads the two new PDFs, parses them, adds the new snapshot to the chain and rebuilds the static site.

#Use it

I built vtaircrafts with Claude Code doing most of the typing; the first version went live in under a day. The judgement calls above are the real product, and those were mine.

The data is free under CC BY 4.0 and the code is MIT. If you're a journalist, a researcher or just curious about what flies over you, take it. And if you spot a misread, open an issue.

• Site: vtaircrafts.in
• Code and data: github.com/Nik-code/vtaircrafts

One caveat: it covers aircraft on commercial permits only, about 1,300 of India's roughly 2,300 manned aircraft. Private, training and government aircraft have no public list.