Last year, when the FAA announced that it was beginning a multi-year process to clean up the civil aircraft registry by requiring all aircraft to re-register on a rolling schedule, the agency warned it would cancel registrations for any aircraft whose owner did not respond. They weren’t kidding.

HAI’s Finance and Leasing Committee checked recently and found some 300 helicopters with cancelled registrations. If any of those 300 is in active use, it’s now illegal to fly them until they have been re-registered. And that’s the point. Under previous rules, aircraft registrations did not expire, and over the years, paperwork had not kept up with ownership transfers, so that the FAA no longer knew with any certainty who owned which aircraft.

In addition to the 300 cancelled helicopter registrations the Finance and Leasing found, it discovered another 1,200 helicopters with expired or soon-to-expire registrations.

More information about the re-registration process, including a calendar for determining when your paperwork is due, is available on the FAA website.