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CaptainsGround

Sources and methodology

Every profile page on CaptainsGround Registry is built from official FAA and NTSB sources. Registration data refreshes weekly from the FAA Releasable Aircraft Database; accident records come from NTSB CAROL; Airworthiness Directives come from the FAA AD library; type-design references come from the FAA Type Certificate Data Sheets. The snapshot date is shown on every page so you know how fresh the answer is.

Data sources

  • FAA Releasable Aircraft Database — bulk download, public domain, weekly cadence. The MASTER and ACFTREF tables provide registration, owner, and make-model fields. Imports run on Sunday 03:00 UTC; expected weekly diff is 0.5–2% of rows.
  • FAA N-Number Inquiry — interactive lookup. Used as a freshness reference for vanity availability; never scraped at request time. Vanity checks are cached for 24 hours.
  • NTSB CAROL — weekly diff against the public CAROL search results. Joined to a tail by N-number when CAROL exposes the field; otherwise linked by date+location.
  • FAA Airworthiness Directives library — monthly diff. We capture title, issue date, effective date, applicability narrative, and source PDF URL.
  • FAA Type Certificate Data Sheets — quarterly diff. PDF parsing extracts the headline configuration fields shown on the AD-by-make page.
  • FAA Service Difficulty Reports — quarterly bulk XML. Currently used for fleet-level reliability signals; not surfaced per tail at MVP.

Refresh cadence

Each profile page shows the snapshot date for its primary fields. The current snapshot for the launch corpus is 2026-05-31. Per-N pages are regenerated weekly; the AD-by-make page regenerates monthly; the methodology page ships with the build.

Privacy and removal

The FAA Releasable Aircraft Database publishes individual owner names and addresses. Those records are FAA-public, but our policy is more conservative than the raw feed:

  • Per-individual-owner pages are not published. Owner-fact appears inside the per-N profile only.
  • Individual owner names and addresses are redacted by default and revealed only after a no-bot challenge.
  • Entity owners (LLC, dealer, airline, flight school, government) are shown without redaction.
  • A removal-request form is published; the published service-level commitment is 14 calendar days.

What we do not do

  • No language-model summarization at request time. Any AI-precomputed summary is cached.
  • No paid scrapers or live ADS-B feeds in the MVP.
  • No per-state aggregate page or per-individual-owner aggregate page.

Reporting an inaccuracy

If a fact is wrong on a page, we want to know. Use the removal / inaccuracy form and we'll respond within 14 calendar days.

Sources