50,000 U.S. Airplanes Disappear

Jason Blair

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 at 09:29 PM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

The FAA implemented a new triennial aircraft re-registration process over three years ago to transition from permanent registrations and update the list of active aircraft in the U.S. aviation system.
This process has already led to a significant reduction in registered aircraft, decreasing from nearly 360,000 in September 2010 to just over 342,000 by December 2012.
Once all expired registrations are processed, the total number of aircraft is projected to drop by over 50,000, representing an approximately 15% reduction from the original registry.
The re-registration effort aims to provide a more accurate count of active aircraft, which is vital for understanding the U.S. aviation system's activity level and capacity.

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Just over three years ago the FAA began the process of updating registrations for all U.S. aircraft. The new registrations transitioned from “permanent” registration to requiring registration renewal every three years. One of the goals of this process was to update the list of aircraft that were still active in the U.S. aviation system.

At the end of September 2010, the day before re-registration began, there were 359,942 aircraft on the Civil Aircraft Registry, according to the FAA. At the end of December 2012, the most recent end-of-quarter date, there were 342,937 aircraft on the Registry, a reduction of more than 17,000 tail numbers.