The FAA registry is free. So what are you paying us for?

So what actually happens between their file and ours

1. The whole registry is not new registrations. It is every aircraft on the US register, most of it registered years ago. A new-owner list means diffing today's file against yesterday's and keeping only what changed — which means holding the history to diff against. Downloading the file once tells you nothing about what is new.
2. Most of it is not businesses. The registry is full of individuals who own a single light aircraft. We keep FAA registrant types 7, 3, 2 and 8 — LLC, corporation, partnership, non-citizen corporation.
3. Type 2 is a trap. Registrant type 2 is "Partnership", so it reads like a business code. Measured against the live file, roughly three quarters of type-2 rows are bare personal names at residential addresses. Filing jointly is not evidence of a company, so a type-2 row has to look like a company as well before it ships. Types 7, 3 and 8 do not need it — their person-shaped rate is a rounding error.
4. One company registers several aircraft. A fleet buyer can put half a dozen tails on the register in a week. Counting records instead of companies overstates how many letters you can send, which is why every figure on this site is published as a record count and a company count, never one alone.
5. It arrives as a spreadsheet, on a schedule. Company name and mailing address, deduplicated, in the states you asked for, without you writing any of it.

When you should not buy this

If you want phone numbers or email addresses, this is the wrong product. The FAA registry does not publish them, so nobody selling from this registry has them, including us. These are postal leads. If your sales motion is a call list, buy a call list.

If you need every aircraft owner in a territory, not the new ones. We sell change, not the universe. A full-fleet database is a different purchase and a better one for that job.

If you have an engineer and a spare afternoon a week. Everything above is ordinary work. It is not secret and it is not hard — it is just work, and it does not stop. We are selling you the not-stopping.

If your state is empty this month. Some states register nothing in a thirty-day window. Check yours before you pay — the count is on every state page, and where a state is too thin we take the buy button away rather than sell you an empty file.

Common questions

Is this scraped? No. It is the FAA's own published file, read on a schedule.

How current is it? The registry is re-read daily and the file you buy covers the last 30 days of registrations. Subscribers get a file every Monday containing only what is new since their last one.

Do the addresses reach the operator? Usually. In Delaware, Montana, Utah and Wyoming a large share of records carry a registered agent's address rather than the operator's, because those are common places to domicile an entity. We say so on those states' pages rather than quietly dropping them.

Can I buy one specialty, or one aircraft type? No. You buy a state or the country, and everything in it comes with the file.

Look before you buy

Every state's current company and record count is published, and there is a real sample file you can read without paying.

See every state's count →   Or read a sample file