Faa Aircraft Registry MCP Server

@pipeworx/faa-aircraft-registry

Look up a US aircraft tail number (N-number) in the FAA civil aircraft registry — manufacturer, model, serial number, engine, airworthiness class, registrant type, registration status, certificate dates, and deregistration if the N-number has left the active registry.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1864+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

• faa_reg_lookup(n_number) — resolves one N-number ("N12345" or "12345") to its aircraft/engine reference data, registrant type, and registration status. Registrant NAME is returned only for non-individual registrant types (corporation, LLC, partnership, co-owned, government) — an individual's name is personal data and is withheld, with the response saying so. A deregistered record never returns a registrant name at all (see "Personal data" below).

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://registry.faa.gov/database/ReleasableAircraft.zip — the FAA's full civil aircraft registry, refreshed daily. Four files are loaded: MASTER.txt (currently-registered aircraft), ACFTREF.txt (airframe make/model reference), ENGINE.txt (engine reference), DEREG.txt (historical deregistrations). DEALER.txt and RESERVED.txt ship in the same ZIP but are out of scope for this pack. US federal data, public domain.

Why this is a local-copy pack, not a live proxy

There is no live query API — the FAA only publishes the daily bulk ZIP. This pack reads a Supabase mirror (faa_reg_acftref, faa_reg_engine, faa_reg_aircraft, faa_reg_dereg; schema in supabase/migrations/236_faa_aircraft_registry.sql) loaded once a day by scripts/ingest-faa-aircraft-registry.mjs (.github/workflows/faa-aircraft-registry-refresh.yml). Every successful lookup response carries data_as_of from the row's own loaded_at.

The fetch itself is routed through the gateway, not done directly. registry.faa.gov fronts itself with Akamai, and the block is header-shape, not IP-reputation alone (corrected 2026-10-08: refresh run 37731086667 got a live Akamai 403 straight from the gateway's own Worker route, which an earlier, incorrect version of this note said could not happen). Reproduced and fixed with a throwaway Cloudflare Worker on the prod account: a bot-shaped UA with Accept: */* gets Akamai's "Access Denied" HTML (HTTP 403) on this exact URL, while a realistic browser header set (a real Chrome UA, a browser-shaped Accept/Accept-Language, and a same-origin Referer) gets a clean HTTP 200 with the genuine ~73 MB ZIP — same Worker, same IP, only the headers differ. A residential IP and the Supabase egress relay were also tried and both 403 regardless of header shape, so the gateway's own /admin/faa_reg_fetch_zip route (workers/gateway/src/index.ts), sending those browser-shaped headers, is the one route that serves; the ingest script calls it and does the actual unzip/parse/load from wherever it runs.

The DB load is TRUNCATE + psql \copy per table, all four in one transaction, using the pooled connection string the ingest script reads from its environment — this is a full daily snapshot, not an incremental upsert, because today's MASTER.txt does not contain yesterday's deregistered N-numbers at all. A parse failure on any of the four files rolls the whole transaction back, so yesterday's data stays live rather than a table going half-replaced.

Empty-registry guard

If the daily refresh has never completed a successful run, the backing tables are empty but the query against them still succeeds — so a naive read would answer a confident found:false for every N-number, indistinguishable from a genuine miss against good data. faa_reg_lookup checks for at least one loaded row before answering and throws a loud dataset_unavailable-class error naming that condition instead (fleet #2790, 2026-10-08).

Personal data

MASTER's TYPE REGISTRANT column distinguishes an individual registrant (code 1) from a partnership/corporation/co-owner/government/LLC/non-citizen entity (codes 2,3,4,5,7,8,9). The registrant NAME column is personal data for an individual and is stored in the mirror (it is in the FAA's own public bulk file) but is never returned by faa_reg_lookup when type_registrant is 1 or blank/unknown — only non-individual registrant names are returned, and the response states which case applies.

DEREG.txt (historical deregistrations) carries no registrant-type column at all — there is no way to tell an individual from an entity in that file — so faa_reg_lookup never returns a registrant name for a deregistered record, regardless of what the registrant actually was.

Repeated deregistrations

An N-number can be deregistered, reassigned, and deregistered again — the worst case in a real file measured 2026-10-08 was 9 events for one N-number — but the mirror's deregistration table keys on N-number alone, so only the most recent event (by cancel date) is kept (scripts/lib/faa-dereg-dedupe.mjs). Every deregistration response carries dereg_events, the count of historical events collapsed into it, and a note when that count is greater than 1 — so the response never implies the shown event is the only one on record.

Code tables

type_registrant, type_aircraft, type_engine and the airworthiness class (CERTIFICATION) are the FAA's own long-stable, widely published code sets, decoded in src/index.ts with the raw code always included alongside the label. status_code's table is a smaller, best-effort decode of the common codes (A/D/E/M/R/S/V/W/Z, sourced from public search snippets of the FAA's own ardata.pdf layout doc, which itself answers 403 on every egress tried — unlike the data ZIP, routing around that was not worth it for one reference doc) — an uncommon or future code comes back with the raw value and a null label rather than a guess.

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "faa-aircraft-registry": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/faa-aircraft-registry/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/faa-aircraft-registry/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1864+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/faa_reg_lookup \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"n_number":"N10000"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/faa_reg_lookup. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-faa-aircraft-registry is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/faa-aircraft-registry/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "faa-aircraft-registry": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-faa-aircraft-registry"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Faa Aircraft Registry data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT