What is an Aircraft Bill of Sale Form?

For some, the allure of piloting your own airplane is too much to resist. Should you find yourself in this camp, buying your very own aircraft could be the culmination of a lifelong dream. Perhaps as far back as childhood, you held a sense of curiosity and wonderment for all things taking flight. As you veered into adulthood, you took measures to convert your ambitions into a reality by learning how to fly a plane. After many hours of study, and plenty of time in the cockpit with a licensed instructor, you obtained your pilot’s license from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). While holding this registration allows you to fly on your own, you need your own plane to truly maximize that feeling of freedom. As many can probably imagine, airplanes are expensive toys, and it may take months or years of saving before you have the funds necessary to buy one of your own. Once you have arrived at that point, however, and you have finalized a deal with the seller, you will need to complete an aircraft bill of sale form before you can exit the runway.

Flying your own aircraft is a considerable privilege. As an airplane is a true marvel of engineering, there are a number of safety precautions that need to be taken before lifting off. Just as you would not drive a car without a license and registration, so too should you make sure all of your FAA paperwork is current for your plane. On a basic level, this means having an aircraft registration, which is obtained by completing a Form AC 8050-1 – Aircraft Registration Application. If you have purchased a previously owned aircraft–which is likely, as they are much more affordable than brand-new planes–you will need to complete an aircraft bill of sale form in order to get it registered. Fortunately, by working with a private service such as ours at the National Aviation Center, you can complete this process online.

Why is an Aircraft Bill of Sale Form Necessary?

Since its invention more than 100 years ago, air travel has been a fairly well-regulated practice in the United States. Though it has been around for quite some time in one way or another, the FAA took shape as we know it in 1950. As a major transportation agency in the United States, the FAA faces a number of important tasks, duties, and responsibilities. They are in charge of issuing licenses to pilots, managing air traffic control duties for our skies, and maintaining an accurate registry of all aircraft in the country. In order to maintain the completeness of said registry, the FAA needs to be notified any time a plane’s ownership changes hands, hence the need for a bill of sale form.

How Do You Complete a Bill of Sale?

So, after many months of scouring listings in digital and print media, you located the plane of your dreams. After a bit of negotiation, you and the seller have agreed on a price, and you are nearly cleared for take-off. Well, in order to complete the process of transferring ownership into your possession, it will be necessary for you and the seller to complete a bill of sale document. This is officially called Form AC 8050-2 by the FAA.

In your Form AC 8050-2, you will need to provide some basic details about yourself and the aircraft involved. You and the seller will need to print your names and titles and provide signatures. For the aircraft, you will need to fill in the N-number, serial number, manufacturer, and make. To obtain this form, you can visit the FAA’s website and click around until you find a PDF file of Form AC 8050-2. You can then download it, print it out, complete it by hand, and mail it back to the FAA’s offices in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma for processing. Of course, that can be a time-consuming process, and who really has time to venture down to the post office these days? Luckily, that is where we come in. 

Fill Out Your FAA Forms Online Today

Instead of the headache of printing out forms and manually filling them out, why not complete your FAA paperwork online the easy way? At the National Aviation Center, we can help you get all of the FAA documentation that you require to legally operate your plane. Whether you need an initial registration, a registration renewal, a replacement certificate, or a change of address, we have online forms for these and many other matters. We also rely on an SSL-encrypted web portal, so you can rest easy knowing that your personal information will be transmitted safely and securely. To learn more, contact one of our helpful customer service representatives by email today.