State of the US General Aviation Fleet 2026

The FAA aircraft registry lists 309,715 aircraft with a valid US civil registration as of July 11, 2026. “Valid” here means an active registration status — FAA status codes V, M, or T — and excludes pending, expired, revoked, and reserved records.

Of those, 296,986 (95.9%) are crewed aircraft — the airplanes, helicopters, gliders, and balloons people fly — and 12,729 (4.1%) are large uncrewed aircraft: delivery and agricultural drones that carry N-numbers. This report focuses on the crewed general aviation fleet, but the drone count is reported here for completeness. The registry also includes airline and commercial aircraft, which is why manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus appear later in the data.

Texas registers the most aircraft of any state, with 29,153 (9.4% of the national total), followed by California and Florida. State here means the owner address on file with the FAA, not necessarily where the aircraft is based or flown.

The notable outlier is Delaware, which ranks 4th with 10,824 registrations despite being the second-smallest state by land area and among the least populous. Delaware over-indexes because a large number of aircraft are held by Delaware LLCs and owner trusts — a common ownership structure for tax, liability, and financing reasons — so the registered address is a Delaware entity rather than the state where the aircraft lives. The same effect, to a smaller degree, lifts states with popular registered-agent and trust domiciles.

General aviation is, overwhelmingly, small airplanes. Fixed-wing single-engine airplanes make up 218,215 registrations (70.5% of the fleet). Multi-engine airplanes and rotorcraft (helicopters) follow, and everything else — balloons, gliders, powered parachutes, gyroplanes, and the growing category of large uncrewed / hybrid-lift aircraft — is a small share of the total.

The crewed fleet is concentrated among a handful of legacy general-aviation brands. Cessna alone accounts for 76,105 aircraft — about 25.6% of all crewed registrations, or roughly one in four. Together, Cessna, Piper, and Beechcraft represent 142,818 aircraft, nearly half (48.1%) of the crewed fleet. Boeing and Airbus appear because the same registry includes US-registered airline and commercial jets.

At the model level, the Cessna 172 is the most-registered aircraft in the country, with 21,185 on the registry. The list below groups every variant of a model into one family (for example, all 172M, 172S, and R172K variants count as the Cessna 172). Each model links to its full fleet statistics — registrations by state, model-year distribution, engines, and seats.

The US general aviation fleet is old. The median crewed aircraft with a recorded year of manufacture was built in 1979 — roughly 47 years old as of the July 11, 2026 snapshot. More than half (51.0%) of aircraft with a recorded year were built before 1980.

The distribution below shows why. The 1970s produced the single largest cohort still flying, and production fell sharply through the 1980s and 1990s — the well- documented downturn in US piston-aircraft manufacturing — before recovering in the 2000s as new composites, glass cockpits, and the experimental / kit-built segment grew. The recent decades also include newly built airline and business jets.

Piston engines dominate general aviation: 233,275 crewed aircraft (78.5%) are piston-powered. Turbine aircraft — turboprops, helicopter turboshafts, and jets — make up most of the rest, with jets (including US-registered airliners and business jets) the largest turbine group. Aircraft with no engine are gliders and balloons.