Aircraft dealer records: what travels with every sale

Buyers read logbooks before the paint. The airframe, engine and propeller logbooks each tell a separate story, and a missing page in any of them can move the price or stop the deal.

Scan every page in order. The sale file should hold the headline figures beside the scans: total airframe time, engine time since overhaul, propeller time since overhaul and the damage history. Record each gap the day it turns up, with the page range, the entry dates either side and the date the owner was asked to supply it. A blurred photograph counts as a missing page.

Next comes what has been inspected, and when. The file needs the last inspection date, the date the next one falls due and the compliance status of every airworthiness directive and service bulletin for the type. Gaps here stall a lender.

A pre-buy inspection adds findings. Each finding becomes a row with an estimate, a decision, the date it was agreed and the name of the party who accepted the cost. Not a PDF buried in an email chain. A lender’s surveyor and a buyer’s counsel can check rows line by line, and they can check nothing in a forwarded attachment.

Papers differ by country. The dealer confirms the current list with the registry or counsel, then builds a checklist from it and sets a reminder against each expiry date. An aircraft imported years ago may carry papers from two countries, and both sets belong in the file with a note of which registry issued which. A usual set holds the registration certificate, the airworthiness certificate, a radio station licence, the weight and balance report and the equipment list.

Cross-border sales add an export certificate of airworthiness and a deregistration step, and both are slow. The dealer system should show the status of each paper and when it was requested, because a licence that lapses the week before delivery stalls the handover. Slow papers need early requests.

Money follows paper. A refundable deposit is held against conditions such as subject to pre-buy, subject to financing or subject to insurance, and each condition needs its own line. Record the amount and date received, then tick and date each condition as it clears, so whoever approves the release instruction can compare it with the list.

The escrow agent holds the funds, not the dealer’s software. What the software holds is the escrow reference, the lender’s payoff letter, the title search result, the bill of sale and the instruction that releases funds. Sales and finance read one status.

Note who confirmed each release. On closing day, a short list of what still remains beats a full folder of papers nobody has read.

One aircraft, one record. The cleanest file is keyed by serial number and registration, with every scan, date and note beneath it, so a search by either number lands on one aircraft. Owned stock and consigned stock share the layout, though a consigned aircraft also carries the owner’s floor price and commission terms. A turboprop or helicopter adds component lives, such as rotor blades and engine hot sections, each with its own hours and calendar limits.

Give each aircraft a checklist. Show the missing items to the salesperson talking to the buyer. When a lender or buyer asks for the file, export it in the order they expect, with the trade-in appraisal beside the sale it belongs to. Nobody should build that folder by hand.