Every US civil aircraft carries a registration number (a “tail number” starting with N). That number is the key to its federal paper trail: the FAA’s registration records and the NTSB’s accident investigations. Checking it takes about a minute and costs nothing.
Step 1 — Find the tail number
It’s painted on the fuselage or tail, listed in any for-sale ad, and printed on the registration certificate carried in the aircraft. US tail numbers look like N1258C — the letter N followed by up to five digits and letters.
Step 2 — Pull the record
Enter the tail number in the TailLookup search. The free report merges the FAA registration record with every NTSB accident record on file for that aircraft — the answer is in the first line, with dates, locations, injury levels, and the NTSB’s official probable cause for each event. Every record links to the underlying government source so you can verify it yourself.
Step 3 — Read it critically
A clean NTSB history means no reported, investigated accident — not that nothing ever happened. Minor damage repaired in the field, hangar rash, and hard landings that never met the NTSB reporting threshold won’t appear in any public database. That’s why a records check is the first step of due diligence, not the last: see the records to pull before buying an aircraft.
Watch for tail-number reuse
Registration numbers get reassigned. The same N-number can belong to a 1930s biplane, a 1990s jet, and a 2020s kit plane over its lifetime — so make sure the accident record you find belongs to the same airframe (serial number), not an earlier aircraft that wore the number. TailLookup separates these automatically and labels earlier aircraft on the same number.