Registration and Its Life Cycle
The legal life of an aircraft begins with registration and ends with removal from the register. Under Article 22 of the Air Code of Georgia, every airworthy aircraft is subject to compulsory state registration with the issue of an appropriate certificate: a civil aircraft — in the state register of civil aircraft or the register of ultralight aircraft; a state aircraft — in the state register kept by the Ministry of Defence. The rules of registration, recording and removal for civil aircraft are established by the Agency, and only aircraft holding an airworthiness certificate are entered in the state register. Experimental aircraft are not registered in the state register — they are recorded with the organizations carrying out test-design or scientific-research flights. An aircraft made by non-industrial means with a mass of no more than 1 000 kilograms must be registered with the appropriate aviation-sports service.
Understanding the life cycle of registration matters practically as well: the sale, write-off, loss without trace, change of purpose or transfer of an aircraft to a foreign state is always reflected in the register entry, and an incorrect state of the entry affects the force of the certificate too. Therefore, in every transaction connected with an aircraft, the first step is to verify the register data and the second is to update the entry accordingly.
Grounds for Removal from the Register
Article 23 of the Code lists the cases in which an aircraft is removed from the state register:
- on write-off due to unairworthiness;
- at the request of an authorized person;
- on declaration of the aircraft as lost without trace;
- by agreement of the contracting parties, and on transfer for term use to a foreign state or its persons;
- on change of the aircraft's purpose.
Upon removal from the register, the registration certificate issued for the aircraft loses its legal force — a rule critical under any ground of removal, since the formal existence of the certificate no longer justifies flight.
Removal also has a procedural weight of its own: since each ground is exhaustively listed, an entry cannot simply disappear — a decision grounded in one of the statutory cases stands behind it. For the owner this means predictability: the register changes only where the law itself provides the case, and any doubt about the lawfulness of a removal can be raised against that closed list.