Originally Posted by
rwanttaja
The problem is, I don't think there's a consistent process to update the entry after the plane flies. As I've mentioned in other postings, I've got a friend who made the first flight of his RV-6 about 25 years ago. It's *still* listed with a blank for certification. Even worse, it's had two minor crashes (after my friend sold it) so it's counted as two homebuilt accidents without being counted even once toward the total number of homebuilts.
I cross-reference the NTSB accident database with the FAA registration database to confirm the "homebuilts" identified by the NTSB are truly homebuilts. For my 2012 analysis, a quarter of the airplanes (54) didn't have entries in the FAA certification column. And nearly half of those (20) were shown with more than 100 hours aircraft time. One had over 1,000 hours.
On the reverse side, I once noted a homebuilt that crashed on its first flight...yet I tracked its registration back a number of years, with a definitive entry as a EX-AB aircraft (e.g., #1 should have applied, but didn't). The policy just isn't consistent.
There is another code in the registration listings, "Status Code", which gives some additional information, such as that the N-number is reserved, but the airplane is not yet registered. Again, though, it's hard to know how often these are updated.
Ron Wanttaja