TailGuard was founded by a certified aircraft mechanic. Years of pre-purchase inspections kept showing the same imbalance: a buyer of a €5,000 used car gets an instant, independent history report — accidents, odometer, past owners — for the price of a lunch. A buyer wiring six or seven figures for an aircraft gets a logbook stack curated by the seller, and a handshake.

The strange part is that the data exists. The FAA publishes the full registry and every maintenance difficulty report filed since 1995. The NTSB publishes every accident and incident investigation. Airworthiness directives are in the Federal Register. But it is scattered across databases with different formats, different identifiers, and traps a casual search will miss — like N-numbers being reused across different airframes, which silently attaches one aircraft's accident history to another.

So we built the tool we wished every buyer had. One tail number in. Every official record out — cross-checked against the airframe serial, benchmarked against the fleet, scored 0 to 100, sources cited. Fixed-wing and helicopters, because private helicopter buyers are even more exposed than airplane buyers.

TailGuard is an independent data service. We are not affiliated with the FAA or the NTSB, we do not sell aircraft, and we have no stake in whether you buy — only in what you know before you do.