Importing a glider into the United States

Why anyone does this

Roughly seventy years of European glider production, a much larger active fleet, and a used market with real weekly turnover in German, French and Polish. Against that, the American market for a specific type in a specific condition can be two aircraft, both in the wrong state, both overpriced because they are the only two.

Our guide to buying a glider covers where that market is and what a pre-purchase inspection has to find. This page picks up where that one ends: you have found the aircraft, you want to bring it home, and now you need to understand what the process actually involves before you send anybody any money.

The question that determines everything

Before anything else, establish whether the type holds a US type certificate.

Most of the mainstream European types you would want — the Schleicher, Schempp-Hirth, Grob and DG families in their common variants — have been certificated in the United States, frequently decades ago, because they were sold here in numbers. Where that is true, the import is largely an administrative exercise: you are adding one more airframe to a type the FAA already recognises.

Where it is not true, you are in different territory. The routes then run through experimental airworthiness, with the operating limitations that come with it, and the effort steps up considerably. This is common for less usual types, for older or short-production-run designs, and for aircraft that were never marketed in North America.

Neither answer should stop you. Both should change your budget, your timeline and what you are willing to pay. Establish which one you are in before you negotiate, because it is worth money.

The documents

What the FSDO or MIDO will expect to see, broadly:

Proof that the aircraft is no longer registered where it came from — a certificate of de-registration from the exporting country's authority. For a new aircraft this is instead a certificate of non-registration.
An Export Certificate of Airworthiness issued by the exporting authority.
Evidence of ownership — a bill of sale in a form the FAA Registry will accept, tracing to the seller.
An application for US registration, with the reserved N-number.
An application for a US airworthiness certificate — Form 8130-6 — supported by an inspection signed by an appropriately certificated mechanic, plus enough data to identify the aircraft, which in practice includes photographs and the data plate details.
The aircraft's records — logbooks, maintenance history, weight and balance, and evidence of compliance with applicable airworthiness directives, which may need mapping from the exporting country's equivalents.

Gliders are handled as a special class of aircraft in the FAA's certification scheme, and the relevant advisory material sits under AC 21.17-2A. Your MIDO is the authority on how it applies to your specific aircraft — this is not a case where reading the circular substitutes for the conversation.

The dangerous step, and how people get stranded

De-registration is irreversible in practice and it grounds the aircraft immediately. The moment the seller's national authority removes the aircraft from its register, it has no nationality, no registration and no airworthiness certificate anywhere in the world. It cannot legally fly in the country it is standing in. It is a large fibreglass object in a trailer until the FAA issues its certificates — and if something in your paperwork is wrong, it stays that way while you fix it.

This produces the standoff that makes these deals awkward. The seller will not de-register before being paid, because a de-registered glider is unsellable to anyone else. You do not want to pay in full before de-registration, because until it happens you cannot proceed and you have no leverage. Both positions are entirely reasonable.

The ways this is normally resolved:

Staged payment — a deposit on agreement, the balance on production of the de-registration certificate and the Export C of A. Written into the sale agreement, with a deadline and a stated consequence.
Escrow — a third party holds the funds against defined documents. Standard for larger aircraft, entirely available for a glider, and cheap relative to the risk.
A broker or dealer who has done this before — the fee buys the sequencing knowledge, and for a first import it is frequently the best money in the transaction.

What does not work is a friendly agreement between two enthusiasts in different jurisdictions who trust each other and have not written anything down. Nobody is being dishonest in the stories that end badly; somebody is simply on holiday for three weeks while an aircraft sits in a shed belonging to neither party.

A workable order of operations

Confirm the US type certificate status. Before you negotiate.
Talk to your MIDO or FSDO. Early, and before money moves. Ask what they will want for this aircraft, in what form. Practice varies between offices, which is itself a thing worth knowing rather than resenting.
Reserve the N-number. $10 for a year, online, and it removes a dependency from the critical path.
Get the pre-purchase inspection done — over there. Do not import a problem. The inspection is harder to arrange at distance and it is more important, not less, because you will not be walking away easily once it is in a container.
Agree the paperwork obligations in the sale contract. Who obtains the Export C of A, by when, at whose cost, and what happens if the authority refuses it.
Then de-register, ship, and file. In that order, with the FAA side already understood.

What it costs beyond the price

Nobody's numbers will be yours, but the categories are stable and forgetting one is how budgets fail:

Freight. A glider travels in its trailer, in a container, and the trailer is often worth as much as the shipping. Quote it early; it is a real number and it varies more than you would expect by route and season.
The trailer's own admission to the United States and its subsequent titling and registration in your state, which is a separate bureaucratic exercise with no aviation content whatsoever and surprises people.
Customs and duty. Get this checked by someone who does it professionally rather than by reading a tariff schedule.
Inspection and certification labour on this side.
Currency. You are buying in euros. A three-month transaction has exchange-rate exposure, and it is easy to lose more on that than on the negotiation you spent a month on.
Instruments. Radios and transponders certificated for European use may not be what you want in US airspace, and altimeters in metres are legal but tiring. Budget for changes and see FLARM, ADS-B and what actually sees you before deciding what to keep.

Once it is on the register

US registration is valid for seven years and the fee is $5. Renewal is straightforward and online, and the single most common way a US-registered aircraft becomes a problem is that the renewal notice went to an old address. Keep the registered address current — a lapsed registration on an aircraft you are trying to sell or insure is a slow and entirely avoidable difficulty.

What this page is and is not

This is the shape of the process, assembled so that you know what you are walking into and can ask sensible questions. It is not a checklist you can execute against, and it would be dishonest to present it as one: requirements are interpreted by individual MIDO and FSDO offices, they change, and your aircraft's particular history — a repair, a modification, an incomplete logbook, an airworthiness directive with no US equivalent — is exactly the sort of thing that turns a routine import into a six-month one.

The authoritative sources are your MIDO or FSDO, the current advisory material, and, for a first import, somebody who has done one. The SSA forums contain people who have, and they are generous with the detail.