FAA Registry Update
August 7, 2026 to September 11, 2026
Covering 5 weeks of registry activity · light aircraft under 12,500 lbs, drones excluded
Between August 7, 2026 and September 11, 2026, the FAA registry added 570 light aircraft and removed 298. The registered fleet grew by 272 to 268,855 aircraft. That works out to about 16 new registrations a day, with the fleet gaining about 7.8 aircraft daily.
More than one in 4 new registrations (25%) were amateur-built aircraft.
Beech saw more removals (15) than registrations (8), a net loss of 7.
Fixed wing single engine aircraft account for 75% of all new registrations.
Twenty more Spirit SE-1s, all in Colorado
Spirit Engineering registered 20 SE-1s this period, every one in Colorado, where the company builds them in Grand Junction. That brings the type to 65 on the registry. The SE-1 is a single-seat, all-aluminum light sport aircraft styled after 1930s designs, with folding wings and a 42-horsepower two-cylinder engine the company built itself. Spirit unveiled it at AirVenture 2025 after ten years of quiet development. Counted by model, only the Cirrus SR22T, SR20, and SR22 added more airframes this period. Piper and Cessna registered more in total, spread across many models.
AOPA: A neat little packageAnatomy of the additions
Factory-new is an estimate. The FAA records a new airframe without a year or an airworthiness date and fills them in later, so an undated addition counts as new when the FAA holds it under the manufacturer's dealer certificate, or its serial number is newer than any dated example of the model. Checked against additions the FAA later dated, the rule catches about 97% of new airframes and lets through none older than three years.
80 years old and back on the books.
Representative image, not the actual aircraft. Photo: Jerry Gunner, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Models not seen last month
Type-certificated models absent from the previous snapshot
What's being registered
When they were built
Manufacture decade of the 69 additions with a year on record. Most new aircraft arrive without one, so this chart leans toward returning airframes.
Who's registering
New registrations by manufacturer
- 1 Cirrus Design Corp 91
- 2 Piper 54
- 3 Cessna 51
- 4 Cessna (Textron) 31
- 5 Spirit Engineering Inc 20
Most-registered models
- 1 Cirrus Design Corp SR22T 30
- 2 Cirrus Design Corp SR20 24
- 3 Cirrus Design Corp SR22 24
- 4 Spirit Engineering Inc SE-1 20
- 5 Cessna (Textron) 172S 15
Where they're landing
- 1. Minnesota 86
- 2. Florida 48
- 3. Texas 41
- 4. Colorado 41
- 5. California 39
Fleet churn
298 aircraft left the registry this period. Leaving is not the same as leaving the sky. Many return after paperwork catches up. The chart below shows registrations vs. removals for the most-active manufacturers.
Re-registrations inflate both sides
An ownership transfer or N-number change can appear as both a removal and an addition of the same airframe. These counts reflect registry activity, not aircraft entering or leaving service.
Methodology
Comparison of FAA Releasable Aircraft Database snapshots dated August 7, 2026 and September 11, 2026, filtered to Class 1 light aircraft (under 12,500 lbs, drones excluded). An added N-number is a new registration, not necessarily a new airframe. The FAA records changes with a paperwork lag. Manufacturer logos are trademarks of their respective owners, shown for identification; image sources and licenses are listed in the logo manifest.