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Every fact, and where it comes from

Each number on the home page and the Terminal page is listed here, in the order it appears. Terminal’s own figures are labeled as Terminal’s.

Home

  1. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel, in the Founders Fund manifesto “What Happened to the Future?”

    Quoted

  2. The FAA publishes its aircraft registry file five days a week, Tuesday to Saturday, and each file replaces the one before. No file is dated a Sunday or a Monday.

    From Terminal’s capture log

  3. The “Last capture” line is read from the manifest of the newest FAA registry capture: the time the capture finished, and the number of records in its MASTER file. Verified means the capture passed its checks before anything was stored: the FAA zip passed its integrity test, all seven files were present, none was empty, and MASTER held at least 90% of the previous capture’s rows.

    From Terminal’s capture manifest

This week in the registry

  1. The rows in “This week in the registry” are read from Terminal’s warehouse when the site is built: new registrations and ownership transfers where a company with a ticker is on one side, and the count of withheld owner records. Company-level only. Individuals and withheld aircraft are never shown.

Front page

  1. The registry ticker on the front page, and each page of its archive at /ticker, is read from Terminal’s warehouse when the site is built. The front page shows the capture of October 3, 2026. A day is a capture that brought a new FAA file. Aircraft on record: the rows in the FAA’s registry file in that capture. Changes since the capture before: the rows in Terminal’s change log first seen that day. This week is the seven days ending on the capture: changes, from the change log; new deliveries, aircraft that passed from a manufacturer to a first holder; deregistrations, cancelled registrations first seen in the FAA’s deregistered file; exports, the cancellations that name an export country. Deregistrations and exports are shown only from the day Terminal kept the deregistered file with every capture; before that they are left out. A capture that follows a missed publication carries every change since the capture before it. Going Dark: registered aircraft with the owner’s name withheld, a count only. Movers follow the Registry Desk’s rule.

    From Terminal’s warehouse

  2. The Registry Desk on the front page is the ticker’s newest day: the seven days ending October 3, 2026. Movers: for each company, Added counts new registrations and ownership changes into the company; Removed counts deregistrations and ownership changes out of it. A subsidiary counts under its parent. Only companies with 25 or more aircraft, or a ticker, are named; lessors, trustees and individuals are never shown. The line under each company states the net change and, when at least four in five of its aircraft that week were one kind, the kind.

    From Terminal’s warehouse

  3. The front page’s chart runs past the Zipline case study’s last day, September 27, 2026, to the capture of October 3, 2026: 3,003 aircraft. Each later point is the same count made the study’s way from that day’s capture.

    From Terminal’s warehouse

  4. The sample pack, as of September 28, 2026: 90 days of data in 15 tables, each as CSV and Parquet, with the company tables limited to 17 sample companies. Counted from the pack’s own manifest.

    From Terminal’s sample pack

Proof

  1. Terminal’s company directory lists 5,818 companies. 5,049 of them hold aircraft on the FAA registry today.

  2. 103 S&P 500 companies hold aircraft on the FAA registry today, of the 110 in the directory, against the S&P 500 list of September 25, 2026.

  3. The Corporate Jet Directory ties 530 business jets to the tickers of 89 S&P 500 companies.

  4. Terminal’s transfers file holds 16,749 ownership transfers since March 20, 2026.

  5. History since March 20, 2026. Every FAA publication captured since August 28, 2026. Before March 20, 2026, no version is counted.

It was in the public file

  1. Zipline’s visible fleet in the FAA registry: 1,431 aircraft on March 20, 2026, and 2,853 on September 27, 2026, from 96 captures. Visible aircraft only: drones under 55 pounds may register in a separate FAA system that is not public.

  2. Before March 20, 2026, the chart’s dashed line is reconstructed data, by the Zipline v2 case study’s method: every aircraft ever seen with a valid registration on a Zipline-built delivery drone model, dated by its earliest certificate issue date. It is a floor, not a count: aircraft registered and cancelled before Terminal’s history starts are missed. The first visible aircraft in the chart were certificated in December 2023. Zipline’s four 2016 STORK aircraft, cancelled in 2019 according to the FAA deregistered file, are before the chart. From March 20, 2026 the solid line is point-in-time data: the count in each capture.

  3. April 28, 2023: Zipline raised $330 million at a $4.2 billion valuation, as reported. No Zipline release for it was found, so it is labeled reported.

    Reported

  4. January 21, 2026: Zipline raised more than $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation, and passed 2 million deliveries.

  5. In the 30 days before the Zipline and Uber partnership was announced on August 17, 2026, 429 Zipline aircraft were certificated. 406 of them were already in a daily FAA capture before the announcement. It was the one clear lead among six Zipline events in 2026.

  6. September 16, 2026: Bloomberg reported that Zipline was in early talks to raise about $1 billion at a valuation of about $20 billion. Reported talks only: not a closed round, and the terms may change.

    Reported, not closed

Research

  1. Heavy drone imports from China fell 76% in 2025. Chinese-made ag drone registrations followed a year later, down 40% from July to September 2026 against a year earlier.

    Census trade data and the FAA registry

  2. About 78% of new Citations and 74% of new Gulfstreams delivered from 2024 through June 2026 joined the US register. Airworthiness dates reach the public file weeks to months late, so the registry trailed earnings instead of leading them.

FAQ

  1. Drones under 55 pounds can register under 14 CFR part 48, online, and those registrations are not in the public FAA file. Small drones whose operators register them under part 47, the regular process, are in the file and are covered.