3,336 aircraft currently on the FAA registry are purpose-built agricultural aircraft — what most pilots and buyers call crop dusters or ag planes. The registry breaks down by family: Air Tractor (1,798, the largest single manufacturer — AT-502s, AT-602s, and AT-802s dominate), Ayres and Thrush "S2R" Thrush Commanders (465, a lineage running from the original Rockwell/Aero Commander design through Ayres and on to today's Thrush Aircraft), the Grumman/Schweizer G-164 "Ag-Cat" biplane family (539, built under five different manufacturer names as the company changed hands), Piper PA-25 Pawnees (456, the classic taildragger ag trainer and light duster), Weatherly ag planes (45), and the Cessna 188 Ag Wagon/AgTruck/AgHusky family (33).
Why ag aircraft need a closer history check than the average airframe
Agricultural flying is some of the hardest structural and corrosive duty an aircraft sees: low-altitude turns at the edge of the performance envelope hundreds of times a season, constant exposure to fertilizer and pesticide chemicals that corrode aluminum and steel from the inside, and load cycles most GA aircraft never experience. Airframes built for it are tough, but that duty cycle also means a used ag plane has usually worked far harder per flight hour than the single-engine Cessna or Piper it might be cross-shopped against. An NTSB accident record — especially one filed under a different N-number after the aircraft was rebuilt and re-registered — is exactly the kind of history a buyer needs and a routine pre-buy walk-around can miss entirely.
What a $79 report adds
Current FAA registration status, prior registrants, recent FAA filings (bills of sale, security agreements/liens), full NTSB accident and incident history, and the serial-number cross-match that catches an accident hiding under a prior tail number — the same check that caught 32% of naive tail-number-only NTSB matches pointing at the wrong airframe when we audited our own data.
Check a specific tail number
Use our free tail-number lookup to check registration status and a summary of what a full report would show, or see our general pre-purchase checklist for the full buying process.