Per my usual practice, I downloaded the FAA registration database at the start of this year, and ran some processes to establish the current fleet size of a wide variety of homebuilt aircraft.
Some key notes:
1. This is based on aircraft registered as of 1 January 2024
2. ONLY aircraft listed in the registry as being Experimental Amateur-Built are included
3. There are about 5,000 aircraft in the US registry that have the names of common homebuilts, but no certification is listed. These are NOT included here.
4. If the Manufacturer says 1000 are flying, and I list only 500...well, first, see #2 and #3 above. Note also that I do not include aircraft that have been removed from the registry due to crashes, export, etc.
5. I select airplanes for this list due to my initial guess as to the prevalence of the type in the US registry. If a type is not listed here, that does not mean that there aren't any, it's just that I didn't run through the process to select out that type. I currently identify about 2/3rds of the homebuilts in the US registry.
6. Yes, I understand that homebuilts aren't necessarily registered under standard names. My process uses multiple variations to attempt to identify as many examples as I can without too many false hits.
Normally, I post this in the form of a table, but I no longer have access to the tool that lets me convert my spreadsheets to EAA-Forum-compatible tables. Hence it's attached as a PDF.
I did post the list as a table to the Homebuilt Aircraft Forum:
This is pretty positive...a net change of ~200 homebuilts from 2021 to 2022, but more than 700 in 2023. That's a net change, though. With the number of homebuilts deregistered in 2023, this put the total new homebuilts in 2023 at 1342. This is the highest since 2009, when the FAA started providing the deregistration data.
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