FAA Aircraft Registry Lookup - N-Number, Serial, Make/Model

Look up US civil aircraft by N-number, serial number or make/model (plus registrant state) from the FAA's official Releasable Aircraft Database. No scraping, no API key. Each run downloads the current FAA file (about 73 MB, refreshed by the FAA daily), indexes it, and returns one row per aircraft.

This is a lookup tool, not a mailing list: names of individual owners, street addresses, cities and ZIP codes are never returned. Only the registrant type, state and country are shown. A registrant's name appears only when the FAA record type is a corporation, LLC, non-citizen corporation or government body and the name carries a company marker.

What you get (one row per aircraft record)

Section	Fields
Identity	nNumber, serialNumber, yearManufactured, modeSCodeHex
Model (joined from the FAA aircraft reference file)	manufacturer, model, aircraftType, engineType, engineCount, engine (maker, model, horsepower or thrust), seats, weightClass
Status	status (code translated to words), isRegistered, recordSource (registered or deregistered file)
Dates	certificateIssueDate, airworthinessDate, expirationDate, cancelDate (deregistered only), lastActionDate
Registrant	registrantType, registrant.state, registrant.country, registrant.name (organizations only), registrant.nameWithheld
Freshness	dataAsOf (date of the FAA file), disclaimer

Not found inputs are returned as found: false with a reason and are not charged. If the FAA file cannot be downloaded or has an unexpected layout, the run fails with an error row (found: null, error): that is never a statement that the aircraft does not exist.

Input

{
  "makeModel": {"manufacturer": "CESSNA", "model": "172"},
  "state": "TX",
  "statusFilter": "registered",
  "maxResults": 50
}

(or {"nNumbers": ["N755SK"]}, or {"serialNumbers": ["17268124"]})

All fields are optional. With no search field the Actor looks up an example aircraft (N755SK). nNumbers and serialNumbers are lookups; makeModel (partial, case-insensitive), state (registrant state) and statusFilter (registered, deregistered, all) filter them, or search the whole file when no lookup is given. maxResults is 1-1000 (default 50). A malformed input fails the run with an English error message.

Things to know

• Manufacturer names of home-built and light-sport aircraft are often an individual builder's name. Those are returned as manufacturer: null with manufacturerWithheld: true, and cannot be used as a search filter. Type-certificated makers, names with a company marker, and names with 50 or more currently registered aircraft (kit makers) are shown. About 12% of registered aircraft have a withheld manufacturer.
• For the same reason, a model that repeats a withheld builder's name or an individual owner's name, and a serial number that contains an individual owner's surname (for example DUNHAM 1 on a home-built aircraft), are returned as null with modelWithheld / serialWithheld: true. Looking an aircraft up by its serial number still works; the serial is just not echoed back.
• Deregistered records (the FAA's deregistered file) have no registrant type, so no name is ever shown for them. A deregistered N-number can have several historical records.
• "Registered" means the record is in the FAA's current registration file; the status field shows whether it is a valid registration or something else (pending, expired, N-number reserved, sale reported).
• Each run downloads the file again (about 4-6 seconds) and indexing takes 10-25 seconds, so runs are meant for batches of lookups, not one aircraft at a time.

Pricing

Pay-per-event, event name aircraft-record (one aircraft record returned). Inputs that are not found or that fail are not charged.

Data source

FAA Aircraft Registry, Releasable Aircraft Database (registry.faa.gov/database/ReleasableAircraft.zip, files MASTER, ACFTREF, ENGINE, DEREG). The FAA states the data is refreshed daily at 11:30 pm central time. Derived from public FAA data; not an official record. Confirm the current status of an aircraft in the official FAA Aircraft Registry.