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EXPLAINER What our acronyms actually mean — and how raw FAA paper becomes a trust score, a valuation, and a page-cited analysis.
Every aircraft in the United States drags a paper trail behind it: registration filings, bills of sale, lien recordings and releases, Form 337 major repair and alteration reports, Airworthiness Directives, accident records. That trail is scattered across FAA microfiche-era archives, NTSB databases, and registry files that were never designed to be read together. When you buy, sell, finance, or insure an aircraft, the story lives in that paper — and the industry has mostly relied on people reading it one page at a time.
PlaneLists was built to read it all, reconcile it, and score it. Three engines do that work. Here is what each acronym means and what each one actually does.
ATLAS is the foundation: the engine that ingests raw FAA records and reconciles them into one coherent, page-cited history of the aircraft.
ATLAS starts with the actual documents — the registration file and airworthiness file the FAA holds for each N-number. It identifies and links every title transfer into a chain of ownership, matches every lien filing to its release (and flags the ones that never got one), catalogs Form 337 major repairs and alterations, maps Airworthiness Directive applicability to the specific airframe and engine combination, and picks up damage indications wherever they surface in the record.
The critical word is reconciles. A lien filed in 1998 and released in 2004 under a slightly different party name is one story; a lien filed in 1998 with no release anywhere in the file is a very different one. ATLAS connects those dots the way a title analyst would — then cites the exact page of the FAA file for every finding, so nothing rests on trust in an algorithm. Everything downstream, from our same-day title search to the scores below, is built on ATLAS output.
VANT is a 300–850 trust score for an aircraft's records — think of it as a credit score for the paperwork, not the airplane.
Two identical aircraft can be worlds apart on paper. One has a clean title chain, every lien released, complete logbooks, and no damage history. The other has an unreleased lien from a defunct bank, a decade-long logbook gap, and a Form 337 that hints at a wing spar repair nobody mentioned. VANT compresses that difference into a single number on the familiar 300–850 scale.
The score assesses four components of the record: title (chain integrity and lien status — an IRS lien or an unreleased artisan lien caps the score hard), airframe history (NTSB accident matches and damage indications), documentation (logbook completeness, including gaps and total-loss situations verified by an appraiser during physical review), and equipment (major alterations and open Airworthiness Directives confirmed against the logbooks). Serious problems act as ceilings — a total logbook loss caps the score at 550 no matter how clean everything else is — while smaller findings deduct points.
One thing VANT deliberately does not do: measure what the aircraft is worth. VANT measures whether you can trust the story the records tell. Value is the next engine's job.
RAMP is our valuation engine: real market comparables, weighted and adjusted, producing a defensible value with a stated confidence level.
Traditional aircraft value guides update quarterly and lean on broad averages. RAMP works the way a good appraiser works, at machine speed: it gathers current market listings for the same and similar types, filters them into true comparables by airframe time, engine status, avionics tier, condition and history, adjusts for the differences, and derives an indicated value with a low–high range. Every RAMP result carries a confidence score, because a value built on twelve strong comps deserves more weight than one built on three thin ones — and we tell you which you're getting.
RAMP runs at three levels: an instant market estimate for a quick read, a verified valuation with a full comp-by-comp PDF, and a USPAP-aligned appraiser-signed appraisal accepted for lending, insurance, and legal use.
ATLAS reads and reconciles the record. VANT scores how much that record can be trusted. RAMP prices the aircraft against the live market. Together they answer the three questions every aircraft transaction turns on: What does the file actually say? Can I trust it? And what is this aircraft worth?
The combination matters more than any piece alone. A strong RAMP value with a weak VANT score is a warning — the market price assumes a story the records don't support. That's exactly the aircraft you renegotiate, or walk away from, before wiring a deposit.
Every US-registered aircraft has a free profile with its registration record, NTSB history, type AD exposure, and fleet context. Start with any N-number — or browse a fleet page to see a whole type at a glance.
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PlaneLists.com — aircraft records, trust scoring, and market valuation from authoritative FAA sources. VANT™, RAMP™, ATLAS™ and AeroGrade™ are trademarks of PlaneLists.