For mechanics & shops
An unfamiliar airplane, a tail number, and forty minutes before it lands
Look up the N-number and you have its identity, registration, owner history and how it has been flying, before anyone opens a cowling. Free, and no account needed.
What you get from a tail number
Before the airplane arrives
A tail number is usually all you get on the phone. Put it in and you have the make, model, serial, engine and registration status before you quote anything.
How hard it has been worked
Observed flights and hours over the last twelve months, the airports it operates between, and any long stretches with nothing detected. Useful context for an airplane you have not seen before.
Who has owned it
Registration history by serial number, so a tail number change doesn't hide the airframe's earlier life from you.
Whether anything is on record
NTSB matches checked against every registration the airframe has carried, with the status of each record stated plainly.
Where this helps most
Pre-buy inspections
Before you spend a day on someone else's airplane, see where it has been based, how much it has moved, and whether the registration history matches the story you were told. It gives you a shorter list of things worth asking the seller about.
Quoting an aircraft you have never touched
Model, year, engine and observed utilization in front of you while the owner is still on the phone, rather than after you have already guessed at a number.
Answering an owner's question about their own airplane
Owners ask what an airplane did before they bought it more often than they ask anything else. Now you can send them a link.
Being straight with you
This is a research tool, not a maintenance tracking system and not a source of airworthiness truth. Observed flight activity is built from third-party observations, is incomplete, and is not tach or Hobbs time. Nothing here substitutes for the logbooks, the records review, or your own determination. If you find something in our data that is wrong, tell us and we will show the correction against the source value.
Look up the tail before it lands
The same N-number lookup, on iPhone and Android. The map and a basic lookup are free.
