@pipeworx/faa-aircraft-registry

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Tools: 1

Look up a US aircraft tail number (N-number) in the FAA civil aircraft registry — manufacturer, model, serial number, engine, airworthiness class, registrant type, registration status, certificate dates, and deregistration if the N-number has left the active registry.

Tools

• faa_reg_lookup(n_number) — resolves one N-number (“N12345” or “12345”) to its aircraft/engine reference data, registrant type, and registration status. Registrant NAME is returned only for non-individual registrant types (corporation, LLC, partnership, co-owned, government) — an individual’s name is personal data and is withheld, with the response saying so. A deregistered record never returns a registrant name at all (see “Personal data” below).

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://registry.faa.gov/database/ReleasableAircraft.zip — the FAA’s full civil aircraft registry, refreshed daily. Four files are loaded: MASTER.txt (currently-registered aircraft), ACFTREF.txt (airframe make/model reference), ENGINE.txt (engine reference), DEREG.txt (historical deregistrations). DEALER.txt and RESERVED.txt ship in the same ZIP but are out of scope for this pack. US federal data, public domain.

Why this is a local-copy pack, not a live proxy

There is no live query API — the FAA only publishes the daily bulk ZIP. This pack reads a Supabase mirror (faa_reg_acftref, faa_reg_engine, faa_reg_aircraft, faa_reg_dereg; schema in supabase/migrations/236_faa_aircraft_registry.sql) loaded once a day by scripts/ingest-faa-aircraft-registry.mjs (.github/workflows/faa-aircraft-registry-refresh.yml). Every successful lookup response carries data_as_of from the row’s own loaded_at.

The fetch itself is routed through the gateway, not done directly. registry.faa.gov fronts itself with Akamai, and the block is header-shape, not IP-reputation alone (corrected 2026-10-08: refresh run 37731086667 got a live Akamai 403 straight from the gateway’s own Worker route, which an earlier, incorrect version of this note said could not happen). Reproduced and fixed with a throwaway Cloudflare Worker on the prod account: a bot-shaped UA with Accept: */* gets Akamai’s “Access Denied” HTML (HTTP 403) on this exact URL, while a realistic browser header set (a real Chrome UA, a browser-shaped Accept/Accept-Language, and a same-origin Referer) gets a clean HTTP 200 with the genuine ~73 MB ZIP — same Worker, same IP, only the headers differ. A residential IP and the Supabase egress relay were also tried and both 403 regardless of header shape, so the gateway’s own /admin/faa_reg_fetch_zip route (workers/gateway/src/index.ts), sending those browser-shaped headers, is the one route that serves; the ingest script calls it and does the actual unzip/parse/load from wherever it runs.

The DB load is TRUNCATE + psql \copy per table, all four in one transaction, using the pooled connection string the ingest script reads from its environment — this is a full daily snapshot, not an incremental upsert, because today’s MASTER.txt does not contain yesterday’s deregistered N-numbers at all. A parse failure on any of the four files rolls the whole transaction back, so yesterday’s data stays live rather than a table going half-replaced.

Empty-registry guard

If the daily refresh has never completed a successful run, the backing tables are empty but the query against them still succeeds — so a naive read would answer a confident found:false for every N-number, indistinguishable from a genuine miss against good data. faa_reg_lookup checks for at least one loaded row before answering and throws a loud dataset_unavailable-class error naming that condition instead (fleet #2790, 2026-10-08).

Personal data

MASTER’s TYPE REGISTRANT column distinguishes an individual registrant (code 1) from a partnership/corporation/co-owner/government/LLC/non-citizen entity (codes 2,3,4,5,7,8,9). The registrant NAME column is personal data for an individual and is stored in the mirror (it is in the FAA’s own public bulk file) but is never returned by faa_reg_lookup when type_registrant is 1 or blank/unknown — only non-individual registrant names are returned, and the response states which case applies.

DEREG.txt (historical deregistrations) carries no registrant-type column at all — there is no way to tell an individual from an entity in that file — so faa_reg_lookup never returns a registrant name for a deregistered record, regardless of what the registrant actually was.

Repeated deregistrations

An N-number can be deregistered, reassigned, and deregistered again — the worst case in a real file measured 2026-10-08 was 9 events for one N-number — but the mirror’s deregistration table keys on N-number alone, so only the most recent event (by cancel date) is kept (scripts/lib/faa-dereg-dedupe.mjs). Every deregistration response carries dereg_events, the count of historical events collapsed into it, and a note when that count is greater than 1 — so the response never implies the shown event is the only one on record.

Code tables

type_registrant, type_aircraft, type_engine and the airworthiness class (CERTIFICATION) are the FAA’s own long-stable, widely published code sets, decoded in src/index.ts with the raw code always included alongside the label. status_code’s table is a smaller, best-effort decode of the common codes (A/D/E/M/R/S/V/W/Z, sourced from public search snippets of the FAA’s own ardata.pdf layout doc, which itself answers 403 on every egress tried — unlike the data ZIP, routing around that was not worth it for one reference doc) — an uncommon or future code comes back with the raw value and a null label rather than a guess.

Tools

• faa_reg_lookup — Look up a US aircraft tail number (N-number) in the FAA civil aircraft registry: manufacturer, model, serial number, engine, airworthiness class, registrant type, registration status, certificate issu