Pre-owned jets: your maintenance records are money

Pre-owned business aircraft transactions fell 7.5% in units but rose 7% in dollar value in the first half of 2026, according to Global Jet Capital's Q2 2026 Market Brief published on 18 August 2026. If you are an owner, operator or CAMO, the decision to make is not whether the market is healthy — it is — but whether you invest now in cleaning up and digitizing your airworthiness records, ahead of the sale or fleet entry you are targeting for 2027: in a market where supply is scarce and values are high, the price gap between two identical airframes comes down to documentation quality.

A scarce, expensive market: what the Q2 2026 brief says

The Global Jet Capital Q2 2026 Market Brief, released on 18 August 2026 and relayed by the National Aircraft Finance Association, paints a market that is paradoxical only on the surface. The figures, all from the brief unless stated otherwise:

Pre-owned transactions are down in volume, up in value. In the first half of 2026, pre-owned transaction volume was down 7.5% in units and up 7% in dollars year over year. The brief attributes the divergence to stable aircraft values and strong demand for heavy jets. Average bluebook values rose 2.9% year over year in the second quarter.

The unit decline is partly a comparison-base effect. In Q1 2025, pre-owned transactions had jumped 37.4% year over year as some buyers pulled purchases forward to beat the implementation of U.S. tariffs. Without that urgency, Q1 2026 mechanically shows an 18% decline against that exceptional quarter. In Q2 2026, with the comparison back to normal, transactions actually grew 3.7% — a sign, for Global Jet Capital, that demand remains healthy.

2026 data is preliminary. The brief itself warns that the year's figures will rise as more transactions are reported to data providers. Across all transactions (new and pre-owned), first-half dollar volume is down 4.8% year over year as currently reported; new deliveries show declines of 19.8% in units and 14.5% in dollars. Global Jet Capital believes a significant share of this decline reflects reporting lags, and that final new-delivery data should come back in line with OEM targets.

OEM backlogs are swelling. Backlogs rose 20.4% year over year in Q2 2026 to reach $66.8 billion, driven by new business jet orders. On the production side, Aviation Week counted on 10 July 2026 some 293 business jets and turboprops delivered in the second quarter, versus 268 a year earlier — growth that does little to loosen supply against backlogs at that level.

The read from GlobalAir.com on 19 August 2026 sums it up well: business aviation is "softer on paper than it is in the air" — flight activity up, backlogs expanding, young-aircraft inventory tightening, values firming. In other words: few aircraft for sale, buyers present, prices holding.

Key figures from Global Jet Capital's Q2 2026 Market Brief.

Why scarcity shifts value onto the records

In an abundant market, the buyer negotiates on the airframe: they compare ten equivalent aircraft and play sellers against each other. In the market described by the Q2 2026 brief — tight inventory, stable-to-rising values, demand concentrated on heavy jets — that leverage fades. The buyer can no longer credibly threaten to walk to the other nine aircraft: they do not exist. What remains negotiable is risk. And risk, in a pre-owned transaction, is read in the records.

The mechanism works like this, as we practice it on the CAMO side. The pre-purchase inspection of a business jet rests on two pillars — the physical inspection and the records review, as Welsch Aviation outlines — and, in our experience, it most often begins with the records review, before anyone lays eyes on the airframe. That review covers the aircraft's full history: back-to-birth traceability of life-limited parts, airworthiness directive (AD) and service bulletin (SB) compliance status, damage history, work orders and certificates of release to service, successive ARCs. The airworthiness review report required under point M.A.903(h) by Regulation (EU) 2026/100 is exactly one of the documents the buyer, their CAMO or their lender will ask for: if it is not retained in a provable form, the ARC line of the grid below becomes a finding. Any documentation gap can then become a finding: as Corporate Jet Investor describes, records findings become negotiation points that weigh directly on the final price — renegotiation, condition precedent, escrow holdback while the missing document is rebuilt — when the deal does not collapse outright.

Two factors amplify this mechanism in the current context. The first is financial: most acquisitions at this size involve a lender or lessor — Global Jet Capital is precisely such a market player — and every financing rests on a documentary audit of the asset. A gappy records package does not just lower the price; it can make the aircraft unfinanceable on the expected terms, which mechanically shrinks the buyer pool. The second is calendar-driven: with OEM backlogs at $66.8 billion, a buyer who passes on a pre-owned opportunity cannot fall back on a quickly available new aircraft — they wait. This relative scarcity makes every transaction more precious on both sides of the table, and therefore every documentation obstacle more expensive.

Conversely, a complete, coherent and immediately usable records package becomes a selling point in its own right: it shortens the pre-purchase review, reduces the number of findings, reassures the lender and supports the asking price. In our experience as practitioners, on an asset valued in the millions or tens of millions of dollars, even a fraction of a percentage point of avoided discount pays for the cleanup project many times over — no public figure on that discount exists to say otherwise.

Grid: what a buyer checks in your records

Here is, line by line, what the pre-purchase inspection shop, the buyer's CAMO or the lender will look for — and what a gap triggers. This grid serves both sides: the seller preparing an aircraft, and the buyer structuring their review.

Two lessons stand out from this grid. First: almost every gap can be fixed, but at the price of time — duplicates from shops, traceability rebuilt with OEMs, archive retrieval from previous operators. And time is precisely what runs out once the letter of intent is signed. Second: the perceived quality of a records package is also a matter of form. Paper archives scattered across three shops and two continents, even if complete, cost weeks of review and breed doubts that a digitized, indexed, searchable package dispels in days.

The review report is no longer a sale accessory

Until 2026, many sale packages were content to line up successive ARCs. Regulation (EU) 2026/100 changed the required piece: point M.A.903(h) requires the details and outcome of the review to be recorded in a report, retained with the ARC. For an aircraft sold in 2027, the buyer can ask not only "is the ARC valid?" but "is the latest review report in the file, and can a third party use it?" A missing, incomplete, or shop-only report turns the ARC line of the grid into a finding — with the timeline that implies. If your CAMO does not yet archive those reports in a form a third party can search, that is not a 2028 project: it is phase 4 of the plan below.

Where to start: the cleanup project in four phases

Cleaning up an aircraft's documentation ahead of a sale proceeds in a precise order, each phase conditioning the next.

The records cleanup project in four phases, each conditioning the next.

Phase 1 — the honest inventory. Gather everything that exists, wherever it sits: airframe and engine logbooks, archive boxes at the shops, digital files from previous CAMOs, exports from maintenance systems. The goal is not to judge but to know — most owners discover gaps they were unaware of at this stage, and that is exactly the point.

Phase 2 — the gap diagnosis against the grid. Confront the inventory with the grid above, line by line, and qualify every gap: quickly rebuildable (duplicate from an active shop), slowly rebuildable (closed shop, archives with a previous operator abroad), or unrecoverable. This qualification sets the project's timeline and budget.

Phase 3 — the rebuild. Launch all long-lead requests in parallel: duplicate task cards and CRS, LLP traceability with engine OEMs, shop attestations, archive exports. This is the longest phase — in our CAMO experience, allow for several months as the rule rather than the exception — and it is what makes starting well before listing non-negotiable.

Phase 4 — structured digitization. Digitize, index and lock everything into a system that makes the package searchable by a third party: a buyer, their inspector, their lender must be able to answer their questions in days, not weeks. The digitized package then becomes a living asset: every new maintenance visit enriches it instead of thickening a cardboard box.

Run the arithmetic backwards from your objective. If the aircraft is to be sold or enter a fleet in 2027, and phase 3, in our experience, takes several months, the inventory and diagnosis phases belong in autumn 2026 — now. The market context of the Q2 2026 brief, with firm values and buyers competing for scarce aircraft, is precisely the window in which a documentarily clean aircraft captures the full premium; arriving in that window with a records rebuild still underway means leaving money on the table or missing the window altogether.

Bounded case: two identical jets, two records packages

Take a deliberately narrow case. Two heavy business jets of the same model, same production year, comparable airframe hours and configuration, come to market at the same time — in precisely the tight segment described by the Q2 2026 brief. Same asking price.

Aircraft A — complete records. The archives are digitized and indexed: back-to-birth LLP traceability on both engines and the APU, an up-to-date AD/SB status export, continuous work orders and CRS since factory delivery, a clean damage history, ARCs and airworthiness review reports on file. The pre-purchase records review runs in days, with no major finding. The physical inspection confirms the documentation. The buyer's lender approves the asset without special conditions. The transaction holds its timeline and its price.

Aircraft B — gappy records. The airframe is in the same technical condition, but the archives tell a different story: eighteen months of work orders from a previous foreign operator were never repatriated; the traceability of one engine disc stops at a shop that has since closed; two SBs were accomplished without the task cards making it into the file. The records review drags on. Every gap becomes a finding. The buyer demands reconstruction before proceeding: the seller requests duplicates from shops, one of which no longer exists, and the timeline slips by months. The lender conditions its financing on a complete package. In the end, three possible outcomes: a downward price renegotiation, an escrow holdback until full reconstruction, or the buyer walking away — who, in a scarce but not empty market, prefers to wait for the next seller's aircraft A.

Two identical airframes, two records packages: the difference lies in the ability to prove.

The difference between A and B lies neither in the airframe's condition nor in the quality of maintenance: both aircraft were maintained alike. It lies in the ability to prove it. That is exactly what Global Jet Capital's divergence figure means: when asset values rise and supply tightens, the premium goes to sellers able to deliver a documentarily clean asset, fast.

What this article cannot establish

Several limits must be explicit before turning this reading into a decision.

• 2026 data is provisional. Global Jet Capital says so itself: first-half figures will rise with late reporting, and the 7.5% unit decline as well as the 4.8% overall dollar decline will likely soften in final data. Do not decide on figures their own author calls preliminary — decide on the structural trend (stable values, record backlogs, tight inventory), which converges across the NAFA, GlobalAir and Aviation Week readings.
• No public source quantifies the "incomplete records" discount. The bounded case above describes documented mechanisms (findings, holdbacks, delays, collapses), but any discount percentage would be an invention: the discount is negotiated aircraft by aircraft, far from public databases.
• The brief is global and aggregated. The volume/value divergence is driven by heavy jets; your segment (turboprops, light jets, helicopters) may tell a different story. Global Jet Capital is also a lessor and lender: its brief is serious but not disinterested, and its turf is the top of the market.
• Digitizing does not rebuild. A digitization project secures and makes usable archives that exist; it cannot manufacture LLP traceability that vanished with a closed shop. Reconstruction is a separate, longer, more uncertain project — one more reason to launch it before you need it.
• The Q1 2025 base effect skews the volume reading. Part of the unit decline comes from the pre-tariff rush of early 2025, not from weakening demand — Q2 2026's +3.7% confirms it. This article's argument does not rest on a declining market, but on a scarce and expensive one.

Kepler's take: a 2027 sale is prepared documentarily in 2026

Kepler's take: our conviction as practitioners is that the question "what is my aircraft worth?" is asked twelve to eighteen months before listing, not at letter-of-intent stage. Global Jet Capital's Q2 2026 brief describes a market that rewards documentary cleanliness: values up 7%, scarce supply, buyers and lenders discriminating on risk. In this context, the airworthiness records cleanup and digitization project — back-to-birth LLP traceability, AD/SB status, work-order continuity, tamper-evident archiving of ARCs and review reports — is not a compliance cost but an investment backed by the asset's value. Kepler Aviation builds traceability and document-automation tooling for maintenance and continuing airworthiness management, within the Kepler Digitals ecosystem. To assess the state of your records ahead of a sale or fleet entry, contact us.

Sources

• Global Jet Capital, Q2 2026 Market Brief, 18 August 2026: −7.5% in units, +7% in value in H1 2026, 2026 data labelled preliminary, OEM backlogs at $66.8 billion.
• National Aircraft Finance Association, brief relay: same figures, professional channel.
• Aviation Week, Q2 2026 deliveries, 10 July 2026: 293 business jets and turboprops delivered in Q2, versus 268 a year earlier.
• GlobalAir.com, "softer on paper", 19 August 2026: convergent reading (activity, backlogs, inventory).
• Welsch Aviation, pre-purchase inspection: the two pillars, physical inspection and records review.
• Corporate Jet Investor, aircraft records: records findings as negotiation points.
• Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/100: point M.A.903(h), airworthiness review report.