I posted a version of this in another thread, but as I dug deeper, I figured it needed to be a separate thread.

The FAA aircraft registration database includes a "Year Manufactured" column. Nominally, this should be the year a registered homebuilt obtained its airworthiness certificate. About 7% of registered aircraft don't include an entry in this column.

The list of active aircraft only tells you how many aircraft built in a given year are still registered. However, the FAA database also includes a list of aircraft that have been removed from the registry. If one adds the number of active aircraft from a given year to the number of homebuilts from that year that have been deregistered, this should produce an approximation of the total number of homebuilts produced that year.

Here's the result:



Kind of an interesting result. There's a peak around 1980, and one around 2005.

I don't really know why homebuilt production fell off in these periods, but there's one tantalizing hint: They're both around the times that new types of light personal aircraft became popular: The ultralight movement, starting in the early '80s, and the Light Sport era, starting in about 2005. Both cases would have affected the number of EAB aircraft produced. However, even with the combination of the ELSA and SLSA aircraft after 2005, the total number of custom aircraft (EAB, ELSA, and SLSA combined) still tapered off after 2007.

Ron Wanttaja