Using the FAA aircraft registry to find owners
Updated November 12, 2026
The FAA Civil Aircraft Registry is the public record of U.S. civil aircraft registration. Brokers use it to learn who is on the registration for an airplane, and to build a mailing list for a state or a type. This guide stays with public facts about that record. It does not describe how any ranking is calculated.
Two ways to look
For one airplane, the FAA's registry search lets you enter an N-number and read the public record. For a whole territory, the FAA publishes a releasable aircraft download. The file Tarmac Hawk cites is the one on the FAA site: releasable aircraft download. It is a snapshot of the registry, not a live feed of sales, and not a list of airplanes offered for sale.
The download is a database extract. You will see one row per aircraft, with fields the FAA has decided are releasable. You should not expect a narrative, a photo, or a broker's remarks.
Fields you can actually use
A typical releasable record includes the N-number, serial number, manufacturer, model, and year manufactured. It includes the registrant type and the registrant's name, street, city, state, ZIP code, and country. It includes dates such as the certificate issue date and the expiration date, plus a status that distinguishes a valid registration from one that is not. Engine and aircraft-type fields are in the file as well.
Read those fields as registration facts. The year manufactured is not the year the current owner bought the airplane. The name is the registrant, which may be a person, a partnership, a corporation, a co-owner, a government body, or another entity the FAA accepted. An LLC or a trust on the registration is common. The street address may be a home, a hangar office, a registered agent, or a PO box, and it may be out of date even when the registration is still valid.
What the registry does not have
Email is not a standard field in the releasable aircraft file. A vendor who claims the FAA "gives you the owner's email" is adding something the registry did not publish, or guessing. Phone numbers are not part of that download either. Tarmac Hawk does not put phone numbers on its lists.
The registry also does not say the airplane is for sale, what the owner would accept, or whether a lender is involved. Those facts, when they exist, come from the owner. A registration that has been in one name for a long time is still only a registration.
Registrations expire. Under the FAA's current rule, an aircraft registration certificate expires three years after the last day of the month in which it was issued, and the owner has to renew it to keep the registration valid. An expired record is a poor first letter. Check the status and the expiration date before you write.
How brokers filter it
A practical pass looks like this. Limit the file to the state on the registration, not the state you wish the owner lived in. Keep the manufacturers and models you sell. Drop records whose status is not a valid registration. Skim the registrant name so you are not writing "Dear Mr." to a company. Then stop. You now have a directory, and it is probably still long.
That directory is legal to read because the FAA publishes it. What you do next is your outreach, and it has its own rules. See cold outreach to aircraft owners for the email rules and for what to do when someone asks you to stop. Mailing a letter to the published address is a normal use of the file. Publishing the file again, or reselling it, is not something the download invites you to do.
Using it next to a shorter list
Many brokers keep the registry for lookups ("who is on this N-number?") and use a shorter working list for the week's letters. Tarmac Hawk's state lists are that kind of shorter file. They are built from public FAA records and other public sources. They add a mailing address for each owner and an email when one is already available from public sources. They are not a reprint of the entire state registry, and they are not offered for states that have not cleared our own past-sales check. Those states show as coming soon.
If you want to see the shape of a list before you rely on it, request the free masked preview. It will not show you a real owner's name or N-number. That is deliberate.
Tarmac Hawk publishes a ranked list for each state it sells, built from public FAA records and other public sources. The rank is an estimate from past sales, not a claim that any owner is listing an airplane. Request a free masked preview at tarmachawk.com, or start from the states directory.