US FAA Part 135 Charter Air Carrier & Operator Intelligence

Turn the FAA's official weekly Part 135 Operators and Aircraft List into operator-level JSON/CSV for research, Clay and n8n. Each result represents one certificate designator and includes its source-listed aircraft and model variants.

Source limitations: the workbook does not contain operator state, city, DBA, commuter/on-demand classification or air ambulance status. These output fields remain null. The state and operationKind inputs must be empty or ALL; other values are rejected before any download or charge. faaRegion filters the CHDO office prefix, not operator geography. No company-name classification is performed.

Price

$0.007 per successful unique operator saved to the default Dataset ($7 per 1,000). One row is one operator, regardless of the number of aircraft or models in its arrays. No start charge, separate aircraft charge, or platform usage surcharge for standard runs. Empty results and validation failures produce no billable rows. Uniqueness is per run/certificate designator; running again creates newly billable results. maxResults defaults to 20 ($0.14) and is capped at 2,000 ($14). Apify's maximum run spending limit is enforced by its Python SDK.

Inputs

Input	Meaning
state	Unavailable in primary source; leave empty/ALL. No office-to-operator state inference.
faaRegion	ALL or exact CHDO prefix AL, CE, EA, GL, NE, NM, SO, SW, WP. Raw office prefix only.
operationKind	Unavailable; leave empty/ALL. CFR codes are retained separately in cfr_parts.
minAircraft	Minimum identified unique aircraft, default 0. Unknown counts excluded when >0.
operatorName	Case-insensitive substring of official certificate holder Name.
maxResults	1–2,000 unique operators, default 20.

Example:

{"operatorName":"Empire Airlines","faaRegion":"WP","minAircraft":2,"maxResults":5}

Source and mapping

The Actor downloads FAA's official landing page and discovers the current XLSX link at runtime. No Socrata endpoint, login, browser, Playwright or third-party directory is used.

Verified 2 November 2026: sheet sheet1, columns CFR, CHDO, DSGN, Name, Aircraft M/M/S, Registration No., Serial No.; 11,519 source rows and 1,794 distinct certificate designators. The workbook contains no precomputed aircraft total. HTTP Last-Modified was 26 October 2026 19:07:27 UTC; workbook modified metadata was 26 October 2026 18:51:54 UTC. The landing page's own update date is separate and is never substituted for the workbook date. FAA describes the list as updated weekly; this is not a live feed.

Output	Definition
designator_code	DSGN, unique certificate grouping key
certificate_holder_name	Name, exactly as supplied
dba_name, city_state, operation_kind	null; absent from workbook
faa_district_office	Raw CHDO office code(s), not operator address
total_aircraft_count	Unique identified aircraft under this certificate in this workbook
aircraft_makes_models	Sorted unique source Aircraft M/M/S strings; source abbreviations preserved
aircraft	Deduplicated registration/serial/model detail objects
aircraft_count_complete	False when source rows lack both aircraft identifiers
unidentified_aircraft_rows	Number of source rows with no registration or serial
cfr_parts	Raw CFR values, e.g. 135 and 121/135; not operation classification
faa_region	CHDO prefix values, not operator locations
source_url	Downloaded official workbook URL
source_updated_at	HTTP Last-Modified in UTC; null if absent
source_updated_at_basis	HTTP Last-Modified, or null
source_workbook_modified_at	Workbook document metadata, not live certificate verification
fetched_at	Actual UTC download timestamp

Aircraft are deduplicated by normalized registration within each certificate. If registration is missing, serial plus model is used; a uniquely matching serial/model with a known registration is reconciled first. Rows missing both identifiers are not counted. If no aircraft can be identified, total_aircraft_count is null rather than a claimed zero. For partial fleets the count is a lower bound and aircraft_count_complete is false. The same aircraft listed under different certificates remains associated with each source certificate. It is never merged across operators. Models are descriptive source strings, not a standardized aircraft taxonomy.

Use and interpretation

This is a snapshot of the operator–aircraft combinations in the FAA source. It does not establish registered ownership, aircraft availability, current actual flight activity, service geography, safety ratings, insurance, medical capability or present legal status. Operator certification, aircraft registration ownership and operational flight activity are separate concepts. FAA advises contacting the local FSDO if an operator or aircraft is absent or charter status needs confirmation. Missing data is not proof of nonauthorization. This independent product is not FAA endorsed.

The file is a public FAA factual list; no dataset-specific license or numeric request quota was stated on its landing page when checked. See FAA website policy. No FAA logos are redistributed. Downloads are sequential, bounded to 20 MB compressed/100 MB uncompressed, with connection/read timeouts, at most three attempts per URL and a 160-second acquisition deadline. Changed columns, conflicting certificate names and invalid rows fail before any Dataset write, so no operator event is charged for source parsing failures.

Clay and n8n

Run the Actor, then fetch its default Dataset as JSON or CSV. Output links are provided in the run Output tab. JSON preserves aircraft arrays. For CSV use clean=true; arrays may be JSON-encoded or flattened by the export format. Import designator_code as the stable operator key. n8n can call the run-sync-get-dataset-items API; Clay can import the Dataset CSV/JSON URL. Authentication is handled with your Apify token in your integration, never in public URLs. SUMMARY in the key-value store records source schema, counts, filters, timestamps and timing.

Reliability

Default sample is 20 operators and targets under five minutes; run timeout is 240 seconds, memory 256 MB (maximum 512 MB). Schema changes stop the run with an explicit error instead of silently misjoining aircraft. No source values are replaced with invented addresses, service classifications or zero fleet counts.