Homebuilts Deregistered in 2018

[rwanttaja]

About ten years ago, the FAA instituted a mandatory re-registration process for aircraft owners. Every three years, owners have to re-register their aircraft. If they fail to do so, the aircraft's registration is cancelled.

This has always had a big effect on the homebuilt ranks...in fact, in the first cycle of the process, almost a quarter of the homebuilts were removed from the FAA registry.

The number has been rising again... it was up to 2700 in 2018, which was a tenth of the entire fleet.

What was interesting was the *types* of homebuilt de-registered. I had expected a lot of older designs...projects never completed, planes scrapped years ago, etc. But there was a surprising number of "modern" kit aircraft in the mix as well.

Here's a summary of the planes de-registered in 2018:

Aircraft Type	# Deregistered in 2018
Avid	51
Baby Ace	33
Bede	21
Bensen	53
Bowers Fly Baby	20
Challenger	93
Glasair	38
Glastar	32
Kitfox	111
KR-1/KR-2	33
Lancair	57
Midget Mustang	28
Monnet (Except Sonex)	42
Murphy	20
Pietenpol	32
Pitts	68
Rans	63
Rotorway Helicopters	73
Rutan Designs	92
Searey	21
Sonex (Including Waiex)	32
Steen Skybolt	25
Stits	19
Stolp Starduster	29
Thorp T-18	19
Vans (All)	214
Velocity	17
Zenair	98

The types shown are basically from a "rough cut" of looking at the registered make and model and identifying the more-common name for the aircraft. There are probably more in most of the types.

This data is from the January 2019 FAA database.

Ron Wanttaja