Ask what an aircraft is worth right now and you’ll get a confident answer from almost anyone — the owner, the broker who wants the listing, the online calculator. Ask what it will actually trade for, and the honest answer takes more work. We’re writing this in the strongest seller’s market in nearly three years, and the instinct is to assume any airplane will fetch any number. It won’t. The deals we watch fall apart are almost never about the market. They’re about a valuation that ignored what the logbooks, the engine programs, and the maintenance clock were saying all along.
The market backdrop: sellers hold the cards, buyers hold the checklist
The International Aircraft Dealers Association released its third-quarter market report in late October, and the headline numbers confirm what we’ve been seeing on the sales desk. IADA-accredited dealers closed 409 transactions in Q3 2026, up from 367 a year earlier, and 1,155 deals through the first nine months of the year against 983 over the same stretch of 2025. Dealers rated market conditions 3.62 out of 5, up from 3.45 in the second quarter. More telling is IADA’s market driver index, which measures whether buyers or sellers have the leverage: it fell to 2.65, the strongest seller position in almost three years.
Supply explains most of it. Amstat’s third-quarter data shows just 5.1% of the heavy jet fleet listed for sale as of September 30, against a ten-year average around 7%. Owners waiting on new deliveries are holding their current aircraft longer, which keeps late-model midsize and large-cabin inventory off the market. Roughly 60% of dealers surveyed by IADA expect large-cabin prices to keep rising over the next six months, and about 30% say they’re more willing to buy aircraft into their own inventory — dealers don’t spend their own money on airplanes they expect to lose value.
But the same IADA report carries a number sellers should sit with: even in this market, dealers logged 44 price reductions in the third quarter and watched 45 deals fall apart. IADA’s executive director summed up the reason — the market is strong and maturing, with buyers more selective and pricing increasingly tied to aircraft condition. Tight supply raises the ceiling. It does not repeal the rules.
What actually sets the number
A serious valuation starts with comparable sales — what same-model aircraft have actually traded for recently, not what they’re listed at. Asking prices in a tight market tell you what sellers hope; closed transactions tell you what buyers paid. From that baseline, the specific airplane moves up or down on a handful of factors that matter far more than most owners expect.
Published pricing guides and online estimators are a starting point, nothing more. They average across the fleet, and no one buys the average airplane — they buy a specific serial number with specific hours, specific records, and a specific maintenance status. Total time matters too, in both directions: unusually high hours discount an airframe, but so can unusually low ones, because an airplane that sat is an airplane with its own set of problems.
Engine and maintenance programs
Whether the engines are enrolled on an hourly maintenance program — and whether that enrollment transfers to the buyer — is often the single largest swing in a valuation. An overhaul on a business jet engine is a six- or seven-figure event, and a funded program means the next owner isn’t writing that check alone. Two otherwise identical aircraft, one enrolled and paid up, one not, are not worth the same money, and the gap widens as the engines approach overhaul. The same logic applies to auxiliary power unit and avionics programs, just at smaller scale.
Pedigree and paperwork
Complete, original logbooks; a clean damage history; a traceable chain of ownership; and records of who maintained the aircraft and where. Buyers in 2026 are paying premiums for certainty, which means they’re discounting hard for doubt. Missing logbook entries, a gear-up landing twenty years ago, or a stretch of ownership in a jurisdiction where records are thin — each of these takes real money off the number, and no amount of seller optimism puts it back. Damage history in particular follows an airplane forever: even a properly repaired incident resets what a cautious buyer will pay.
The maintenance clock
Every aircraft is flying toward its next major inspection, and the market prices that in. An airframe fresh out of a major check is worth more than the same airframe twelve months from a big one, by something close to the cost of the event itself. The valuation question isn’t “what is this model worth” but “what is this model worth with this much runway left on the expensive items” — engines, landing gear, and the heavy airframe checks.
Configuration, avionics, and cabin
Mandate-compliant and currently supported avionics keep an aircraft in the conversation; an aging cockpit facing an expensive upgrade pulls the value down by most of that upgrade’s cost. Cabin and paint matter more than sellers like to admit, because they’re what the buyer’s principal actually sees. And some configuration choices — a popular floor plan, extended-range fuel, recent connectivity — add value, while unusual one-off configurations can narrow the pool of interested buyers and lengthen days on market.
Where sellers get it wrong in a market like this
The seller’s-market mistake is pricing to the headline instead of the airframe. We see listings priced off the strongest recent comp — an enrolled, low-time, one-owner example — for an aircraft that shares only the model name. Those airplanes sit. Days on market pile up, the listing goes stale, and the eventual price cut lands below where an honest number would have started. The 44 price reductions in IADA’s Q3 data didn’t happen because the market is weak. They happened because the first number was wrong.
The buyer’s-market mistake, still alive in this market, is skipping discipline because inventory is scarce. Buyers who waive or rush the pre-buy inspection to win a tight deal are really just moving the valuation argument to after closing, when it’s their problem. The pre-buy is where the paper valuation meets the physical airplane, and the discrepancies it finds — an undocumented repair, corrosion, an engine trending the wrong way — are exactly the items the price should have reflected.
How we run valuations
OnFly Air’s sales desk is run by people who operate aircraft, not just transact them, and it shows up in how we build a number. We start from closed comps, not listings. We read the logbooks before we anchor a price. We model the maintenance status — where the engines, gear, and checks actually sit — and adjust for program enrollment and transferability. And we tell clients the number we believe, not the number that wins the listing. For sellers, that means pricing that generates offers in weeks instead of corrections in months. For buyers, it means knowing which premium is justified by the airframe in front of you and which is just the market talking.
In a market this tight, the spread between a well-supported valuation and a hopeful one is wider than it’s been in years — and so is the cost of getting it wrong in either direction.
Thinking about selling into this market, or trying to buy in it? Our acquisitions and sales team is available 24/7 at (858) 529-7860 or quotes@onflyair.com for a straight answer on what an aircraft is really worth.