Quote Originally Posted by Grum.man View Post
I'd wager that the vast majority of these de-registrations are people who just forgot/didn't know/don't care. The other bulk are people who lost interest in flying be it for money or medical and don't want to hassle with selling in case they get back into the hobby again some day.
I don't think you're far wrong.

The first rounds of the deregistration process came from 2010 through 2013. In my opinion, most of the planes that were removed hadn't physically existed for decades. They were abandoned, scrapped, etc., and the registrations remained active until an owner was required to react.

I received my first copy of the FAA registry in 1998. My first step was to find out what the most common homebuilt was. I was very surprised at the answer: The Bensen Gyrocopter. Yet they seemed rare.

My hypothesis is that the first line in the Bensen construction manual was, "Obtain a registration from the FAA...."

One goal of the re-registration program was to eliminate these ghost homebuilts. Here's what the Bensen Gyrocopter registrations have done in the past ten years.


I strongly suspect most of the deregistered Bensens hadn't actually existed since the ~70s.

Ron Wanttaja