gsGroundScholar

Sources and methodology

Every profile page on GroundScholar Registry is built from official FAA sources. Registration data refreshes weekly from the FAA Releasable Aircraft Database; accident history is not imported — each profile links to the NTSB CAROL search instead; Airworthiness Directives are not imported either — profiles link to 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 — not imported yet. Profiles make no accident claim either way; they link to the public CAROL search, where you can look the tail up (and any earlier N-numbers the aircraft carried).
  • FAA Airworthiness Directives library — not imported yet. Profiles list no ADs; they link to the FAA DRS search, where applicability is decided by airframe, engine, propeller and serial range.
  • FAA Type Certificate Data Sheets — quarterly diff. PDF parsing extracts the headline configuration fields shown on the Cessna 172 AD guide.
  • 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 2026-10-18. Per-N pages are regenerated weekly; 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