Aviation careers
The Record That Follows You: What the Pilot Records Database Holds
✓ Reviewed against current FAA sources on October 30, 2026
In this guide
There is a sentence in 14 CFR part 111 that explains, better than any advice about honesty, why the form you fill in for one employer matters to the next one. It is not a moral observation. It is a procedure, and it reads like one.
Under 14 CFR 111.105(b)(4), an operator reviewing your application compares the employment history you supplied against the records already in the FAA's Pilot Records Database. If that comparison suggests records might be available that the pilot's previous employer has not yet uploaded, the operator must submit a request to the pilot's previous employer(s) through the PRD to report them.
Read it as a process rather than a rule. You write your history. The operator sets it beside what your employers reported. A gap between the two does not end the matter. It obliges the operator to go and ask.
Nobody may let you fly until they have read it
The obligation sits in 14 CFR 111.105(a): no reviewing entity may permit an individual to begin service as a pilot until the reviewing entity has evaluated all relevant information in the PRD.
That is not a background check somebody may run. It is a condition on your first flight for that operator.
It is kept for the life of the pilot
14 CFR 111.40(a) is one sentence long: The Administrator will maintain a pilot's records in the PRD for the life of the pilot.
The only removal the section contemplates is death. Paragraph (b) sets out what that notification requires, and it includes a certified copy of the death certificate. There is no provision anywhere in part 111 for deleting a record that is accurate. The remedies available to you, which we come to below, are review, correction of errors and dispute. None of them is erasure.
Your own consent certifies your history
An operator cannot read your file without your written consent. That protection is real, and it comes with a condition most pilots sign past.
14 CFR 111.310(b): Provision of consent must include an affirmation that the employment history of the pilot for five years preceding the date of consent is accurate and complete. And if it is not: the pilot must update the employment history to list all past employers.
So the consent form is not only permission. It is a statement you are making about your own five-year history, at the moment you ask someone to go and check it.
You do not have to lie for it to count
This is the part almost nothing written for applicants gets right, and it changed recently enough that most of what you will read elsewhere is out of date.
Effective November 3, 2025, the FAA consolidated its falsification rules. The pilot provision at 14 CFR 61.59 (opens in a new tab) and the mechanic and repairman provision at 14 CFR 65.20 (opens in a new tab) were removed and reserved, and a single rule now applies across pilots, mechanics, repairmen and remote pilots at 14 CFR part 3, subpart D. Any guide still naming 61.59 as the pilot falsification rule is citing a section that no longer exists.
Within that subpart, 14 CFR 3.403 covers fraudulent and intentionally false statements, which is the rule people expect. The one they do not expect is the next one.
14 CFR 3.405 is titled Incorrect statement or omission. Its text contains no mention of fraud, no mention of intent and no mention of knowledge. It turns on whether an incorrect statement or an omission of fact was material. A material incorrect statement or omission may serve as a basis for suspending, modifying, revoking, rescinding, removing or withdrawing a certificate or rating, or for denying an application.
The honest answer to I did not lie, I simply got it wrong is therefore that intent is not the test. That is worth knowing before you fill in a form from memory.
What you can actually do about it
The same part that makes your record permanent gives you more access to it than most pilots use.
You may read all of it. Under 14 CFR 111.315(a) a pilot with electronic access may access the PRD to review all records pertaining to that pilot. And under 111.315(c) you may review all of it without accessing the PRD and without obtaining electronic access, by submitting a form the Administrator provides to confirm your identity. There is a route to your own file that does not require an account.
An error must be reported, and then it is on a clock. Under 14 CFR 111.320 a pilot who identifies an error or inaccuracy in their own PRD records must report it. Under 111.250(a) a reporting entity told of a perceived error must correct that record in the PRD within 10 days of identification or begin dispute resolution. If it disagrees that the record is wrong, 111.250(b)(1) requires it to initiate investigation of any dispute within 30 days, and 111.250(b)(3) requires the final disposition of that dispute to be documented in the database itself.
That last detail is worth sitting with. The outcome of a dispute becomes part of the record. A correction is not a deletion; it is an addition that the next operator also reads.
Two things this does not mean
It is not a complete history of everything you have ever done. The records an employer must report are bounded. 14 CFR 111.205(b)(1) requires reporting of records generated on or after June 10, 2022. Earlier employer records are not within that requirement.
The FAA’s own records carry their own start date. Its help for the Disapprovals page states that Notices of disapproval in the PRD are limited to those occurring on or after August 1, 2010. Failures before that date are not in the database, and are obtained from the FAA on a paper form instead. Anyone who tells you the database holds every event of your entire career is overstating what it contains.
And a notice of disapproval is a practical test, not a written one. This matters for most people reading this page. A notice of disapproval records an unsatisfactory practical test, the checkride. It is not the record of a failed FAA knowledge test, and the two are routinely confused by people who should know better. If you are studying for a written, that is not what this part of the file is about.
It is about pilots. Part 111 and the statute behind it concern pilot records. If you are a mechanic, an avionics technician or a dispatcher, the records-persistence argument on this page is not yours. The falsification rule at part 3 subpart D, however, reaches across FAA-regulated activity, so the second half of this page is.
What follows from all of it
One practical thing, and it is not a trick. Read your own file before somebody else does. You are entitled to it under 111.315, you can get it without an account under 111.315(c), and the only version of this that ever goes badly is the one where an operator finds something you did not know was there.
The rest is arithmetic. What you write gets compared with what was reported. The comparison is required, the record is permanent, and the rule that governs a wrong answer does not ask whether you meant it.