Free tool
Tail number to hex converter
Paste a tail number and get the 24-bit address the aircraft broadcasts. For N-numbers and about twenty other countries the address is an arithmetic encoding of the registration. Other countries require a database lookup.
One or a whole list, in either direction. Any separator works.
Or click an example
Paste a tail number above, or try one of the examples. The message decoder will give you an address out of a raw message.
How this works
- What the address is for
- ADS-B software uses the address, not the tail number. dump1090 and PiAware filters match on it. History sites index by it. An alert for a specific aircraft asks for six hex characters. The tail number is painted on the airframe. The address is what the aircraft broadcasts, several times a second.
- In the US there is nothing to look up
- N1 is address A00001. Every N-number after it steps the address along by one. Canada, Japan, South Korea, France, Germany and others use the same kind of arithmetic with their own ranges.
- When the marks tell you nothing
- The UK, Australia and most of the rest of the world hand addresses out from a register. The marks say nothing about the address, and there is no sum to run. A database lookup is a weaker answer: a miss means no available database has that aircraft, not that the aircraft does not exist.
Got an address instead?
Paste six hex characters and get the tail number, the country, and the arithmetic that connects them.
Open the ICAO address lookupWe turn millions of these into prints
Track one address through a day and you get a flight path. The airport prints layer millions of them into a single image, colored by altitude.
See the airport prints