Skywagon Intel

Every morning around six Central an automated sweep reads the Cessna 180 and 185 pages of the main aircraft sales sites: Trade-A-Plane, Controller, Barnstormers, Hangar67, AircraftForSale, GlobalAir, GlobalPlaneSearch, FindAircraft and Kijiji, plus the dealer sites for Canadian Aircraft Sales and aircraftdealer.com. Those sites are national or worldwide, so one read covers everything they carry.

Facebook Marketplace works differently. Facebook only shows ads within roughly forty miles of a chosen city, whatever radius you ask it for. So the sweep stands in fourteen cities in turn — Anchorage, Seattle, Portland, Boise, Spokane, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, Bangor and Miami — and searches each one for “cessna 180”, “cessna 185” and “cessna a185f”. An ad posted far from all fourteen, in Montana or the Dakotas say, will not be seen here unless it is also on another site.

Craigslist is searched from twenty-one points across the lower 48 and Alaska, each reaching 500 miles, which covers the whole country with overlap. Same search words.

What is kept: whole aircraft offered for sale, including projects, non-flying airframes and partial shares, which are marked as such in orange on the row. What is left out: parts ads (floats, props, engines, seats, wings on their own), ads the sweep cannot open, and anything a dealer’s own site marks sold. An ad that can no longer be found drops off the page the next morning.

Each aircraft is then matched to its serial number from the ad or the registry, and that serial is checked against the NTSB, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, FAA Service Difficulty Reports and the FAA Accident/Incident Data System. Where the ad gives no tail or serial, the row says “not screened”. Where more than one aircraft has worn the same registration over the years, it also says so rather than guess.

The record sources, for anyone who has not met them. Each name links to that database’s own public search page, so you can look up any tail or serial yourself. NTSB is the US National Transportation Safety Board — it investigates accidents and records whether the damage was minor, substantial or destroyed, and the probable cause. TSB is the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, the same job north of the border. CADORS is Transport Canada’s daily log of occurrences, including minor ones the TSB never investigates — it is not part of the daily check here yet. Its search takes a Canadian registration, make and model, not a serial number, so a Canadian aircraft that has changed registration must be searched under each mark it has worn. SDR means Service Difficulty Report — a mechanic’s report to the FAA of a defect found during maintenance, which is how cracked spars and corroded bulkheads get on the record without an accident. AIDS is the FAA’s Accident/Incident Data System — the FAA’s own log, which catches incidents (a ground loop, a gear collapse) that never reached the NTSB. The registry line comes from the FAA register or the Transport Canada register: who holds the registration and in what state, and whether the airworthiness certificate is Standard or something narrower like Restricted, which limits what the aircraft may legally be used for. Form 337s are the FAA’s major repair and alteration records; they are not on any public database — you order the aircraft’s file from the FAA — which is why the box at the top says the logbooks are still mandatory.

Honest limits. Figures are copied from the ads and are not verified. When two sites print different numbers for the same aircraft, both are shown. Some listing sites repeat airplanes that have already sold, so nothing is counted from them unless another site confirms it. The Sources section at the bottom says which sites answered today and which did not.