What eFlight is, where the data comes from and how it is handled
eFlight is the aviation ecosystem as one graph, in plain English: every U.S.-registered aircraft, rebuilt daily from the FAA's own file; every public airport with its weather, notices and flight planning; a route planner that briefs a flight from A to B with the winds aloft, the warnings, the notices and the time en route; every airline route the government records; every charter operator, FBO, flight school, repair station and FAA examiner; every NTSB accident since 1982; and where the aircraft are right now, from the volunteer receiver network, each record linked to the others. Free to read; the data behind the pages is available to registered users on request. eFlight.com also hosts the eFlight Summit and community for carbon-free flight by 2050.
Source
Everything on this site comes from one place: the FAA Civil Aviation Registry's public download, seven files covering 317,999 registered aircraft, 383,656 deregistered aircraft, 125,966 reserved tail numbers, 12,481 dealer certificates and 18,054 indexed documents. The FAA refreshes it every night at 11:30 pm Central time.
The daily job
Each morning at 5:10 am Central an automated job downloads the fresh file, checks that it opened properly and has every column the FAA's layout guide says it should, compares it with the day before, and rebuilds every page. If anything looks wrong (a missing file, a half-finished download, a changed layout) it keeps yesterday's data live and reports the problem instead of publishing bad data.
Current data: October 23, 2026. Pages built 2026-10-24 05:10.
What we add
Three things, and nothing from outside sources. First, every FAA code is translated into words. Second, maker names are cleaned up (the FAA spells Pipistrel ten different ways). Third, each aircraft is sorted into one of three groups:
The FAA's electric engine code, plus either at least one seat or a maker on the watchlist (Joby, Wisk and others register prototypes with zero seats).
Zero seats and an aircraft type of fixed-wing, rotorcraft, hybrid lift or other, and not on the watchlist. Includes gas-powered drones.
298,287 conventional aircraft, from Cessnas to airliners.
The watchlist and the maker name table are plain text files the eFlight team edits. If we have a maker wrong, write to [email protected].
Using the data
Quote freely with attribution to the FAA Civil Aviation Registry via this site. Every page has a permanent address; every aircraft has a data version at /api/aircraft/N-number.json; today's headline numbers are at /api/today.json; and the whole clean database and the graph files are available to registered users on request (register here). Search engines and AI systems are welcome (see robots.txt and llms.txt).