The 31-day wall.

We started logging Barnstormers listings on Jul 19, 2026 to answer a simple question: how long does a used piston aircraft sit before it sells? 1,632 closed adverts later, the honest answer is that we cannot tell you, and the reason is interesting enough to be worth a page of its own.

What the distribution actually looks like

Take every advert we watched appear and later watched disappear, and count how many days each one stood. If aircraft came off the market when buyers turned up, that would spread out: a few quick sales, a long tail of stragglers, a hump somewhere in the middle. It does not spread out. It stacks on a single day.

64% of closed adverts ended on day 31. Not "about a month". Day 31, the same day, 1,044 times over. Nothing about how aircraft are bought produces a number that sharp.

The second clue is the echo. There is a smaller pile at day 61, 3.7% of the total, which is one term plus one more. That is the shape of a subscription being renewed once and then lapsing, not of a market.

Day 31 is not when aircraft sell. It is when adverts expire.

What that means for every days-listed figure

A median is the middle value, so when 64% of the data sits on one number, the median is that number. That is why the median days listed for almost every type on this site reads the same: it is not telling you that a Stearman and a Lancair take the same time to sell, it is telling you that both are advertised on the same terms.

So read any days-listed figure here as how long this advert has been standing, which is exactly what it is and is genuinely useful, and not as how long this aircraft has been failing to sell. An aircraft at day 29 is not about to sell because its time is nearly up. An advert that vanishes at day 31 tells you nothing at all about whether anyone bought it.

The 36% that does mean something

An advert that ends early ended because somebody decided to end it. 22.6% of closed adverts, 369 of them, came down before day 31. Those are the ones worth reading, and they split in a way we did not expect.

The adverts that cut their price stood 21 days before coming down. The ones that never cut stood 15. The cutters lasted longer, which reads backwards until you think about the order of events: nobody cuts on day one. A seller cuts because the aeroplane has not moved, so a cut is a symptom of a slow advert rather than a cure for one.

Treat that as a hint and not a finding. It rests on 30 adverts, which is a small number, and the arrow could point either way: we can see that cutters were up longer, not whether cutting helped them afterwards. It is the kind of thing that becomes real after another few months of watching, and we will say so when it does.

What we still cannot tell you

Whether any of these aircraft sold. A delisting is an advert coming down, and the advert comes down when it sells, when the seller gives up, when the term runs out, or when it is relisted with a new number. The wall at day 31 tells us the fourth case is the common one, which makes the first three harder to separate, not easier. Nobody publishes real transaction prices for private aircraft sales, and we are not going to pretend otherwise by dressing an expiry up as a sale.

What the record does hold, and holds well, is what sellers asked and when they changed their minds. That is the price-cut log, and it is not affected by any of this: a cut is an observed change between two reads, so the advert term has no bearing on it.

The honest version of the original question needs a longer window. Once enough adverts have run past a full term without renewing, the survivor curve on this week starts answering it from the other side, and it is unbiased from day one. How we handle durations explains why we report that instead of a median while the record is young.