Insurance/airport inventory question

Hi everyone:

I have another question from a non-pilot. As I understand it, when you insure your plane you must list its home base.() So if the information from all the insurance companies were pooled one could get a pretty complete list of based planes at any airport. This information typically seems to be kept under lock and key and not public.(**)
(
)For example,
Avemco: avemco.com/Secure/Owned.aspx
Southwest Aviation: southwestaviation.com/aircraft_insurance.php
(**)National Based Aircraft Inventory Program: basedaircraft.com/public/Fre … tions.aspx

My questions are:

  • are there regions of the country where any one insurance company would have a large enough market share to know most of the planes at some airport?
  • who regulates these insurance companies? most insurers are regulated at the state-level but I am not sure if this also happens in aviation

MP

PS I know these questions might sound a bit off the wall, and I would be glad to fill in the details of why I am interested (for some academic work).

Insurance is regulated on a state-by-state basis, which is why some agencies or insurance companies are licensed only in certain states. Maintaining compliance in all 50 states can cost an agency quite a lot of money every year.

As for based aircraft, first you need to define “based.” If I spend six months of the year in Florida and six months of the year in Minnesota, where is my aircraft based? You are correct that insurance companies collect that information, but it’s primarily to ensure that someone doesn’t respond with something surprising like, “I’ll keep it in the shed in my back yard.” which is inappropriate for most (but not all) aircraft.

I am not aware of a region of the country so dominated by a single underwriter that they could assemble a complete picture of all the based aircraft at an airport. The underwriter that writes light aircraft, for example, may not write heavier turbine aircraft, amphibious aircraft, instructional aircraft, etc.

Using insurance company data to figure out all the aircraft that are based at a given airport is possible, but the information wouldn’t be terribly accurate. The insurance company’s information could be out of date, or just somewhat inaccurate.

I hope that helps.

All US airports report the number and type of aircraft normally based at their facilities to the FAA annually.

You can see this information on the airport’s respective overview page here on FA, such as: flightaware.com/resources/airport/KTUL/summary

Thanks MajesticJG and JHEM!

MajesticJG
Thanks: this is really helpful. I had seen that Avemco was in all 50 states (see link in original post) but did not realize that was atypical. I am a bit surprised that the airport is not important in setting premiums, but it is not even listed as a factor (aside from whether a plane is hangared) in how rates are set at Avemco,
avemco.com/Owned/FAQ.aspx#thirteen
or in NBAA’s explainer,
nbaa.org/member/admin/insura … ission.php
nbaa.org/member/admin/insura … e-bird.php
though Travers does seem to use at least the region in rate-setting,
traversaviation.com/questions.html#19
(BTW I see now Travers also requests your home airport,
traversaviation.com/forms/pr … rcraft.php)
Anyway it does not sound like any insurance company has enough information (and the infos that they have is not high enough quality) to even approximate the inventory at an airport.

JHEM
I had known about the aggregate totals (I have the complete list from the Form 5010/NFDC via,
faa.gov/airports/airport_saf … data_5010/).
I was mainly interested in getting the specific tail numbers.

Again thanks for the comments. And if anyone else wants to chime in that would be great!

PS One follow-up: does have numbers for the market shares of various insurers, or even a listing of the biggest ones?

For some reason, the FAA has not been that concerned with reporting those numbers this year. At our annual inspection we were not asked to update based aircraft numbers. I don’t know if it was a result of the shutdown, or maybe a shift in policy.

As stated earlier, insurance is regulated by state. There is an organization (National Association of Insurance Commissioners aka NAIC) that tries to promote some standards across states.

One thing they do is require insurance companies to submit a document called the “Statutory Annual Statement”. This document is done with it’s own accounting rules (different than GAAP) in order to be more conservative (in most cases).

One piece of information required in this document is premium and loss experience by line of business. One of the lines of business is “Aviation”. This is defined as “Coverage for aircraft (hull) and their contents; aircraft owner’s and aircraft manufacturers liability to passengers, airports and other third parties.”

AM Best collects this information and sells products that will allow you to determine the market share of the aviation business (possibly even by state).

Here are a few links that may help. Feel free to PM me if you would like to discuss in more detail. In a prior life I did a lot of numbers work for insurance companies and have familiarity with the Annual Statement. I’m also very curious what you are doing.

naic.org/documents/library_h … ion_pc.pdf
ambest.com/sales/Statement/default.asp

Another possible road to investigate is an organization called ISO (not the international standards organization. Insurance Services Office.
They collect data from insurance companies to help companies who don’t have enough data. They collect data from insurance companies and sell it to companies (and others).
iso.com/Research-and-Analyse … lyses.html

Good luck!

Thanks davysims and cm5299!

cm5299, I will be sending you a PM later tonight (sorry I cannot do it right now but I have to pick up my son). It sounds like you have a pretty good sense of the infos that I am looking for, and I can tell you a bit about what I am using it for.

Hi cm5299:

Sorry to make a post here in the main thread, but if you get a chance I sent you a PM with a question.

Thanks,
MP