Methodology · Public Aircraft Research
We render what the agency published.
Or we link to where it lives.
Every fact on every aircraft page traces back to a US-government primary source. No risk scores, no rates, no aggregate tags, no inference. If we cannot link a fact to its source, the fact does not appear.
01 / Sources
Four government feeds. No editorial layer.
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Identity, type, year, owner, address, status, and certification dates. Rendered cell-by-cell with each cell linking back to the FAA inquiry record.
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Event metadata, narrative, and probable-cause text. Probable cause is rendered verbatim — never paraphrased — and every row links to its ntsb.gov investigation page.
- Federal Register — FAA Airworthiness Directives →
Public domain (US Government)
Per-make/model query at build time; weekly refresh planned
AD title, abstract, and publication date. Each entry links to the Federal Register publication. We do not author summaries.
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FAA does not currently expose a public SDR API. The platform links to the agency portal rather than republishing or paraphrasing.
02 / FAA Privacy Program
Owner identity is suppressed on opt-in.
Aircraft owners enrolled in the FAA Privacy ICAO Address (PRO) program are surfaced here without owner identity. The platform shows the public-facing tombstone fields — tail, type, year, status — and renders a Privacy Program notice in place of the registrant.
PRO state is re-checked on every refresh. We never serve cached non-PRO data after a record has opted in. If a previously-public record opts in, the next refresh updates the page.
03 / What we do not do
No scores. No rates. No interpretation.
- No risk scores or "low / watch / high" tags.
- No accidents-per-hour or rate calculations.
- No make-vs-make or model-vs-model comparisons.
- No "repaired aircraft" flags or inferred status.
- No news or editorial summaries.
- No NASA ASRS data.
- No paraphrasing of NTSB narrative or probable cause.
- No author voice on any specific aircraft or owner.
When the underlying agency record is grave, the platform shows it grave. When it is unremarkable, the platform shows it unremarkable. We do not bridge or characterize.
04 / Disputes & takedown
Found a factual error?
If the agency is wrong
The platform reflects what the FAA or NTSB published. If the underlying agency record itself is incorrect, the dispute belongs with the agency. We refresh weekly and will reflect any agency correction on the next refresh.
If our render is wrong
If we have rendered an agency record incorrectly — wrong N-number, wrong field mapping, ingest bug — please let us know. Use the contact form with the tail number and the specific field disputed.
We acknowledge submissions within 5 business days and resolve within 14. Where the dispute is with the source agency rather than our render, we point the disputant back to the agency channel.
05 / Coming soon
The factual layer first. Everything else later.
Per-tail registration, ADs, and NTSB records are live today. Full ~250,000-tail registry coverage, search type-ahead, and weekly automated rebuilds are coming soon.