About FAA AD Search

Our Mission

FAA AD Search exists because finding FAA documents should not be this hard. Aircraft mechanics, owners, and shops need fast, reliable access to Airworthiness Directives and related documents to keep aircraft safe. The official FAA systems, while authoritative, can be difficult to search, have poorly OCR'd documents, and lack modern filtering and export tools.

We built this free tool to make public FAA documents more accessible.

How It Works

  1. Source Discovery: We identify and catalog publicly available FAA document sources.
  2. Ingestion: Documents are fetched from official sources via public APIs and official web pages.
  3. Processing: We extract text, clean up OCR artifacts, and normalize metadata.
  4. Indexing: Documents are indexed for fast keyword and filtered search.
  5. Serving: Clean, fast search results with source citations on every page.

Data Sources

All data comes from publicly available U.S. Government sources, primarily:

Methodology

Our text extraction pipeline includes quality checks for character coverage, garbage detection, and structural validation. Low-confidence extractions are flagged for human review. We never present extracted text as authoritative — always verify against the official source.

Legal Status

FAA documents published in the Federal Register are U.S. Government works and are not subject to copyright under 17 USC §105. Some documents may incorporate third-party materials by reference, which may have separate copyright. We handle these cases by linking to the official source rather than reproducing the content. See our Legal & Disclaimers page for details.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or feedback? We want to hear from you. Contact us at contact@faadochub.com.