The register line

What is read, and what never is

The FAA keeps a public register of every US civil aircraft at registry.faa.gov, refreshed each federal working day at midnight. Its page for an N-number lists the maker, the model, the type of aircraft, the year built, the serial, the engine, and the registered owner’s name and address.

When you ask for the line, this studio’s server fetches that page and keeps three fields: the type, the model and the year. The parser never reads the owner’s rows, so no name or address reaches a log, a cache or a print. The answer is held at the edge for a day, the register’s own cycle, and a connection can ask thirty times an hour.

When the register leaves the year blank, the line goes without one. When it shows no aircraft under the number, or the number is deregistered, the desk says so and you type the line yourself. The register answers, or you do. The studio never guesses a model or a year.

Look up a number

Receipts from the register

Read from registry.faa.gov on 17 October 2026, one for each kind of airplane the wall’s sample aircraft stand for, with the maker’s name taken off as the type desk takes it off.

The three sample aircraft on the wall carry N728HW, N47TQ and N51TQ. On the same evening the register showed none of the three as assigned, which is why they were chosen: the samples belong to nobody.

The badge is a shape

Aircraft makers register their names, scripts and badges as trademarks, and at least one refuses goods that carry them without a licence. So a piece here keeps the badge on the cowling or the tail in its own colours and its own outline, with no readable letters in it. The maker’s name never sets on the type desk and never appears in the register line, even where the register repeats it inside the model.

The type name is a different thing, and it stays. Skyhawk, Bonanza, Cub and Mustang are what an owner calls the airplane, and a line that reads Fixed Wing Single-engine · F33A · 1976 tells another pilot exactly what hangs on the wall.

What is painted, and what goes elsewhere

Civil and privately owned aircraft are painted, warbirds included: a T-6 or a Mustang on a civil registration belongs to a person. An aircraft in service with an armed force is not painted. An airliner is painted with its airline’s letters left off the livery. A floatplane, an amphibian and a flying boat are aircraft and belong here. A boat with no wings is painted at Painted Hulls, and a photograph of one sent here is handed a link there with no pass spent.

Nothing in distress is painted: no crash, fire, smoke or forced landing. Faces stay small. The same rules run in the prompt, in the photograph check and on this page, and the questions page has the short answers.

Not affiliated

Painted Flight is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration, the Experimental Aircraft Association, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, any aircraft maker or any type club. The FAA register is a public record and is credited as a source on the credits page.