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:
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.
Aircraft Type # Deregistered in 2018Avid 51Baby Ace 33Bede 21Bensen 53Bowers Fly Baby 20Challenger 93Glasair 38Glastar 32Kitfox 111KR-1/KR-2 33Lancair 57Midget Mustang 28Monnet (Except Sonex) 42Murphy 20Pietenpol 32Pitts 68Rans 63Rotorway Helicopters 73Rutan Designs 92Searey 21Sonex (Including Waiex) 32Steen Skybolt 25Stits 19Stolp Starduster 29Thorp T-18 19Vans (All) 214Velocity 17Zenair 98
This data is from the January 2019 FAA database.
Ron Wanttaja