About the Observatory

The AA-5 Observatory is a public, owner-PII-free census of the Grumman American AA-5 family — Traveler, Cheetah, Tiger, and AG-5B. It exists to be the canonical reference the type community can point to: type a tail number, see its identity chain and — as activity data accrues — whether it is still flying and where it is based.

Why this exists

It started with one airplane — N4543A, "Honey," a 1979 AA-5B Tiger — and the simple question of how many sister-ships were still out there. The answer turned into a fleet-wide record. The observatory is a love-project for the type, built in the open so any owner, prospective buyer, mechanic, or historian can use it.

Methodology

The census is derived from the FAA Releasable Aircraft Database (MASTER + DEREG), filtered to curated AA-5 manufacturer/model codes, keyed on the durable (model-code, serial) pair so an airframe is tracked across re-registrations. Owner names and addresses are deliberately excluded from everything published here.

Credit

Built on the FAA's open data and on Simon Willison's scrape-faa-releasable-aircraft, whose git history is the time-series backbone for change tracking.

Open data

The full PII-free census is downloadable: aa5-census.csv · aa5-census.json. Fields: registration, canonical_type, serial_number, year_mfr, state, icao_hex, lifecycle, home_field, last_seen, liveness.