Notes The numbered marks around TrackAD point here.
Every one of these was a paragraph of small print somewhere in the way. They are true and worth saying once, which is what a page like this is for.
Where the directives come from
The directives here are Airworthiness Directives as published by the FAA in the Federal Register, ingested every morning. Each record keeps the FAA's own wording for applicability, compliance and required actions rather than a summary of it, and links to the published rule.
How far back the directives go
It reaches back to 1994, where the Federal Register's own record of these begins. Anything earlier is not in it and will not appear as candidates. Where an aircraft is older than the oldest of them, that is said plainly on the aircraft's own page rather than here, because it changes what the list in front of you means.
Where aircraft details come from
Make, model, serial, year and engine are filled from the FAA Releasable Aircraft Database, refreshed monthly. The registry does not record propellers, so that pair is always entered by hand. Every field it fills stays editable, and where it disagrees with what you recorded, the difference is shown rather than overwritten.
How documents are stored
337s, weight and balance sheets, 8130s and the rest are held outside the web server entirely - no address on this site resolves to them. The only way to read one is through the aircraft it belongs to, signed in as your shop. Files are accepted as PDF or photograph.
Documents larger than 8MB
They are shrunk to fit rather than refused, because a phone photograph of a form is routinely far larger than it needs to be and is legible at a fraction of the size. Photographs are reduced to 2400 pixels on the long edge, which is about 200 dots per inch across a letter-size page; PDFs are downsampled with Ghostscript. Where a file cannot be brought under the limit without making it hard to read, it is refused instead. The record says when a file was shrunk, and from what size.
What it costs
$5 a month or $50 a year, up to 50 aircraft on either. Set against roughly $43 per aircraft per year for a paper AD subscription, one aeroplane is no saving at all and twenty is a large one - the saving is entirely in the volume. Billing is not switched on yet: nothing is charged and nothing expires.
The aircraft limit
It applies when adding an aircraft, never to one already on your books. Reaching the limit does not lock, hide or delete anything - your compliance record stays yours and stays readable. Archiving an aircraft you no longer look after frees a place without deleting it.
Documents on the compliance report
The report lists what is filed against the aircraft and when, so the record shows what exists. It does not reproduce the documents themselves.
A recordkeeping aid, not an airworthiness determination
The directives here are taken from the Federal Register. Applicability is written in prose and often turns on serial numbers, part numbers or prior modifications recorded in manufacturer service documents that are not in this database. Whether an AD applies to a particular aircraft is the certificated mechanic's call.