Three years ago, the FAA instituted a policy that required aircraft owners to renew their registration every three years. Registrations that were not renewed would be cancelled.

So, what did it do to the US fleet?

I don't have an FAA registration database for 1 October 2010 (the day the new program started), but I do have one for 31 December 2010. On that date, there were:

373,869 total aircraft registered
34,916 were listed as Experimental Amateur-Built

As of 15 November:

317,588 total aircraft registered (About a 15.1% decrease)
27,877 listed as Experimental Amateur-Built (a 14.7% decrease)

The FAA includes a list of deregistered aircraft with the database download.

72,888 total aircraft were deregistered from 1 October 2010 to 15 November 2013
7,672 homebuilts were deregistered over the same period.

Almost 20% of all US aircraft (19.5%) have been removed from the rolls, and about 23.5% (nearly a quarter) of the homebuilts.

The question is, will this be reflected in the FAA's flight-hour estimates when accident rates are computed? The FAA has used a low-annual-flight-time value for computing the accidents per 100,000 hours for homebuilts, because so many were supposedly inactive. Seems they should be using closer to even with the rest of GA, now that many of the inactive airplanes have been pared from the rolls.

Note that these aren't the final figures. The FAA says the deregistration process will continue until the end of this year, so there's ~45 more days for planes to be removed.

Ron Wanttaja