Ask an operator "does this Airworthiness Directive apply to my aircraft?" and you would expect a quick, deterministic answer. In practice it is often a manual hunt across several regulators' databases, cross-referencing type certificates, engine models, and effectivity notes by hand — and repeating the whole exercise every time an aircraft changes hands.
We have just shipped a round of updates to the free Aviagent AD lookup. The most important of them reflects a principle that sits underneath how Aviagent treats aircraft data.
The registration mark is temporary. The airframe is not.
A tail number is an event, not an identity.
It changes when an aircraft is sold, leased, or re-registered in a new country — sometimes many times across a twenty-five-year life. An airframe that starts as D- can become G-, then EI-, then 9H-, and the aircraft on the ramp is the same aircraft throughout. What does not change is the airframe itself: its type certificate and its manufacturer's serial number.
AD applicability, compliance history, and engine fitment all belong to that airframe identity — not to whatever mark happens to be painted on the fuselage today.
This is not a philosophical point. It has a practical consequence. Anchor compliance to the registration and you lose the thread every time the aircraft moves: the record restarts, and the history before the change becomes someone else's problem to find. Anchor it to the airframe and the history holds across every transfer.
It is the same principle that makes a back-to-birth record valuable. The value is not in the paperwork; it is in the fact that the chain is unbroken and attached to the thing that persists.
What's new in the lookup
Airframe history, made visible. Search a tail number and — where the aircraft has been re-registered — you now see its registration timeline: the marks it has carried, across countries, back to its earliest available record. One airframe, one identity, many registrations. The timeline is drawn from national civil-aviation registers, with years shown wherever the source register provides a date.
It is a small feature that makes a large point: applicability follows the aircraft, not the label.
A tool stripped back to one job. Search now sits front and centre, and the credibility signals moved out of the way of the thing you came to do. Type a tail, get the applicable ADs. The page has also been rebuilt on the same design system as the rest of Aviagent, so moving between the lookup and the product no longer feels like moving between two companies.
Coverage that keeps growing. The lookup now spans more than 46,000 airworthiness directives across 100+ national aircraft registers plus the US registry — over 350,000 aircraft resolvable by registration — computed across four regulators: EASA, FAA, TCCA and ANAC. It carries more than 17,000 EASA–FAA comply-once links, so a directive satisfied under one authority is recognised under its counterpart rather than counted twice.
Every figure on the page is shown with the date it was last synchronised. A number without a date tells you nothing about whether it is still true.
Who this is for
CAMOs and operators checking applicability without logging into four separate authority portals to assemble one answer.
Lessors and trading desks running pre-purchase or redelivery diligence on an airframe whose registration has changed more than once — where the registration-shaped view of history is precisely the one that fails you. If that is the exercise in front of you, the redelivery checklist covers the wider ground.
Airworthiness engineers who want a fast, deterministic starting point: by registration, or by manufacturer, type and model for any aircraft — including one not yet in a register.
What it is, and what it isn't
This is reference data. It is information only, and it is not a substitute for your accountable CAMO's records or a basis for maintenance action. Applicability shown here has not been verified against your specific aircraft's configuration and modification state, and the operator bears sole responsibility for AD compliance under EASA Part-M, Part-CAMO, and FAA 14 CFR Part 43. Always verify against the official EASA AD Portal and FAA DRS publications before acting.
What it is: free, fast, and built on the principle that an aircraft's regulatory history is a property of the airframe, not the paint.
If you want to see the same applicability logic applied to your own fleet — with the reasoning behind every determination, and your engineers confirming each one — that is what Aviagent does. The lookup is the same engine, opened up.
Try it: adlookup.aviagent.ai
Determining which directives apply to a given aircraft is a longer subject than one tool can cover. If you are working through it properly, start with which airworthiness directives apply to your aircraft.