Mandatory Re-Registration Not Sitting Well With Local Aircraft Owners

The Federal Aviation Administration is preparing for take-off on a plan to require all small aircraft owners to reregister their planes. The FAA discovered it doesn’t have enough registration information on more than 100,000 aircrafts.

“It’s just from sloppy work, I think,” said Don Laurila, who bought a plane four months ago. “They [FAA] haven’t followed up for years to clean up the registration mess.”

Dan Obradovich, of Thermal Aviation, offered another reason why the FAA lost track of so many planes. “Pilots tend not wanting to be found, you know? They’re sort of a free spirit.”

FAA fears terrorists and drug traffickers could buy planes without the government’s knowledge, or steal a plane’s tail number, also known as the N-number.

“They lose track of N-numbers because an airplane sits in this hangar for 20 years and doesn’t ever fly again,” said Tom Rogers. “It gets dismantled, thrown away, and the N-number is still in the database.”

Local pilots say they’re not too worried about their N-numbers being stolen. They’re more concerned about the FAA taking more fees out of them.

“It starts out at $25.00, but where does it end?” asked Obradovich. “We don’t know if it’s based on the value of the aircraft of $100,000 or a half-million dollars.”

There’s another reason some aircraft owners don’t like the mandatory reregistration. Obradovich says they don’t like being told what to do.

The FAA will begin canceling registration certificates of all 357,000 small planes next year to speed up the reregistration process.

“It really is a bunch of baloney,” said Laurila, regarding the crime scare. “I really believe that.”