165000 Piston-Engine Aircraft

[Scott_at_KTYR]

In the Sept. AOPA magazine I read an article by Dave Hirschman about avgas replacements. In the article he said there were only 165000 piston-engine aircraft in the United States. I emailed Dave and he said the numbers came from the FAA. I would have never guessed the numbers would be so low. Before this I would have guessed 500000.

 

[Jim Logajan]

In the Sept. AOPA magazine I read an article by Dave Hirschman about avgas replacements. In the article he said there were only 165000 piston-engine aircraft in the United States. I emailed Dave and he said the numbers came from the FAA. I would have never guessed the numbers would be so low. Before this I would have guessed 500000.

You can download the aircraft registry master file from the FAA:
http://registry.faa.gov/database/AR082014.zip
Descriptive page here:
http://www.faa.gov/licenses_certifi...rcraft_registry/releasable_aircraft_download/

I downloaded the file into a Linux system, did a wc (word count) on the MASTER.txt file and got a line count of 320,153. You would need to run some filters on it to extract just GA piston planes.

But the DOT has some summary numbers on the GA fleet here:
http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_11.htm

According to DOT the GA fleet size:
in 1960 was ~77k
by 1980 grew to ~210k
declined from that number till 1994 when it reached ~173k
increased again after that till 1999 when it reached and has "stabilized" at ~220k +/- 10k (up through 2011 anyway.)

The year the DOT shows that had the largest number of GA aircraft was 2007, at 231,607.