Most historic movies used replicas as original aircrafts are no more available or it's too risky to fly the last survivor.

Please, let's use the [[Tora! Tora! Tora!]] for example :
* no more japanese combat aircraft being flyable in 1970, several BT-13 and T-6 were modified to represent Zero, B5N or D3A.

How to list them ?

As the plane acting (i.e. japanese warplane) ?
or
as the aircraft built (T-6 for example) ?

It's easy to see the machine needed by the story, harder to know what was modified to achieve the goal.

Sometimes, the aircraft SEEN is named on the page; sometimes, it's the original aircraft which is listed.
In [[Tora! Tora! Tora!]], the both ways are used and this is a little confusing.

Is there a rule to work all in the same way ?

Good question.

My personal opinion would be a new rule where they are titled as:

[Imitated Aircraft]([Actual aircraft used])

So in http://impdb.org/index.php?title=Tora!_Tora!_Tora! it would be :

Mitsubishi A6M Zero (North American T-6 Texan)

for example. This would obviously only apply where the aircraft had actually been modified in some way to represent an actual aircraft - like for Air Force One - http://impdb.org/index.php?title=Air_Force_One#Boeing_VC-25A_.27Air_Force_One.27_.28Boeing_747-200.29

I agree.
What about others admin ?
-probably on hollydays for someone-

Wait and see...

Tim and I have discussed it and I feel that the suggestions presented would be a great idea. We can now proceed with implementation. Thanks for bringing this up.