Methodology

How the prices on this site are produced, what they exclude, and what we will not publish at any price. Figures on this page are regenerated from the database, not typed in — they were last read on 2026-09-11.

Where the numbers come from

We are a working parts desk. Buyers send us requests for quotes; we send those requests to suppliers; suppliers reply with prices. Those replies are the entire dataset. We do not scrape listings, we do not buy a price feed, and we do not model or estimate a price for a part nobody has actually quoted.

That has one consequence worth stating up front: this site can only describe parts real buyers have asked for. It is not a catalogue, and the absence of a part here means nobody has requested it, not that it does not exist.

What one “quote” means

One price, from one supplier, for one part in one condition, as stated in one email. That is the unit every count on this site uses.

It is deliberately not a database row. A supplier who answers the same part number across five separate requests with one email has expressed one price, once — but our system correctly records five rows, because each request needs its own reply on file. Counting rows would have inflated some parts by more than three times and pushed bands past our own thresholds on what was really one or two opinions. Every figure below counts supplier communications, not rows.

When we publish a range

A condition band appears on a part page only if it clears all four of these. If any one fails, that condition shows an empty state instead of a number.

• At least 3 quotes. Two prices are an anecdote.
• From at least 3 different suppliers. Three quotes from two suppliers is a real problem, not a technicality: whoever holds two of the three numbers can work out the third exactly from our published range. A supplier should not be able to read a competitor’s quote off this site.
• No single supplier holding more than 60% of them. Enough suppliers is not enough on its own. Three suppliers where one wrote four of the six quotes describes that supplier’s pricing while looking like a market.
• Nothing newer than 7 days. Recent quotes are held back before publication. Most market indices lag, a week makes no practical difference to a buyer, and it means no supplier finds last week’s quote to us on a public page.

Ranges are rounded to sensible increments, so no individual quote can be reverse-engineered out of a published low, median, or high.

What we exclude, and how much

These checks remove quotes before anything is calculated. The counts below are quote records, so they will not subtract cleanly from the 3,882 above: that figure counts supplier communications once repeat records have been merged, and one supplier answering the same part on four requests is four records but one offer.

What has to be true before a quote counts

Four checks run before any quote reaches a published range, and each exists because skipping it produced a number we would have had to defend.

• It has to be about the part. A supplier answering a request sometimes quotes a different part number. Those quotes are excluded from the range, the quote count and the company count — matching is exact, and a near-miss is a different part, not a close one.
• Suppliers are counted as companies. One company can reach a desk through several addresses. We group those together, so a range that says three suppliers means three independent businesses, not three records.
• Outliers and incoherent spreads are removed. A quote far from the rest of its own group is treated as a bad reading rather than as market movement, and a range whose top is many times its bottom is suppressed instead of published — those two are usually describing different things, not one market.
• Prices are per unit. Where a supplier quoted more than one unit we record that, so a reviewer can confirm the figure is a unit price and not a line total. We never divide a price to make it fit.

Where automation ends and a person starts

The evidence behind a page is assembled programmatically, and software helps draft and classify it. What software never does here is decide that something is true: every public sentence is checked against the evidence it cites, any figure absent from that evidence fails the check, and a named person reads and signs off the page before it is published. Nothing on this site is an airworthiness, effectivity or certification determination — those come from your approved data and your quality organisation.

Found something wrong?

Tell us and we will re-check it against the evidence. Send a correction with the part number and what looks wrong. Suppliers who would rather not appear in a published range should use the same route — see below.

Exchange pricing, and why we publish no exchange ranges

An exchange price assumes you send back a repairable core. An outright price does not. They are different transactions for the same part, and the difference can be tens of percent — so averaging them together produces a number that describes neither.

Every band on this site is outright-only. The obvious next question is why we do not publish an exchange band alongside it, and the answer is that the data cannot carry one: exchange quotes are rare enough that no part in our corpus comes close to 3 of them from 3 different suppliers. Publishing an exchange range would mean publishing one or two suppliers’ quotes and calling it a market. Where a part has been offered on exchange by more than one supplier, the page says so in words and names no figure.

This is worth asking your own suppliers about directly. Exchange is a genuine cost lever and many buyers never think to request both.

How accurate this is, stated honestly

Supplier replies arrive as email and are read by an AI parser into structured fields. That parser is good, not perfect, and the honest description of our review posture has three parts.

Quotes that go to a customer get read by a human. Before a price is passed to the buyer who asked for it, the operator checks the parsed values against the supplier’s original email. In his own auditing that catches a discrepancy roughly one time in ten. That review happens in an inbox and is not currently written back to the database, which is why a part page’s provenance block reports a very low count of confirmed quotes. The number is accurate; it undercounts the checking that actually happened.

Quotes never forwarded to a customer may not have had that second look. They are still real quotes from real suppliers against real requests, and they are included. We are not going to claim each one was individually verified.

Some questions cannot be answered from the stored email at all. We hand-checked a sample of 30 overhauled, serviceable, and as-removed quotes to see whether exchange pricing could be identified retroactively. Two were exchange, ten were provably outright, and eighteen — 60% — could not be determined either way, because the price arrived in a PDF attachment, behind a portal link, or in a follow-up message rather than in the email body. That is a ceiling on what any retroactive classification can achieve, and it will not improve for quotes already received.

What we are doing about it: pricing basis is being added as a field the parser captures at the time a quote arrives, so the question stops being retroactive. The same applies to manufacturer, below. Going forward the answer is recorded rather than reconstructed.

Manufacturer: what we state and what we refuse to

Most part pages on this site name no manufacturer. That is deliberate, and it is not because we have no guesses available — it is because our guesses are not good enough to print.

We will state a manufacturer when at least two independent suppliers name the same one in a labelled field of their own quote, or when it appears on a certification document we hold. We will not state one on the strength of a parts-catalogue lookup (ours misattributes a Bombardier part number to a rocket company), an aircraft platform (knowing a part was seen on a PW127M-powered aircraft does not tell you who built it), or a single supplier’s data entry.

We also do not use the US government’s CAGE registry on its own, which looks authoritative and is a trap: it is keyed on part number, and part numbers are not unique between industries. One aviation part number in our own set resolves there to a Chevrolet division of General Motors. Another returns two unrelated aerospace companies. That data can corroborate a name a supplier already gave us; it cannot be where the name comes from.

By that standard, we can currently verify a manufacturer on none of our parts — only 2 of 2,798 quotes state one in a labelled field at all. So the pages say nothing. There is no “probably made by” on this site, because you cannot tell how hedged a guess was by the time you have repeated it to someone else.

What we never publish

• Supplier names. Not on a part page, not in a range, not anywhere. Which suppliers quote us what is their commercial information, not ours to broadcast.
• Any individual quote. Only aggregates — a low, a median, a high, a count of quotes and a count of suppliers.
• Exchange figures. No exchange price, ratio, or percentage, anywhere on the site.
• A price for a part that fails the checks above. The empty state is the honest answer and we use it.

Suppliers: how to be excluded

If you supply us and would rather your quotes did not contribute to anything on this site, email legal@honest.aero and we will remove them. No explanation required, and it will not affect whether we send you requests.

Removal is a code-level exclusion, not a promise someone has to remember. Your quotes are dropped before any calculation runs, and the thresholds above are then re-applied to what is left — so a range that only existed because of your quotes disappears along with them. That is the intended behaviour. No supplier has asked to be excluded so far.

These are observations, not offers

Every price on this site is a record of what suppliers quoted in the past. None of it is an offer to sell at those numbers, by us or by anyone else. Market prices move, availability changes, and the right price for your requirement depends on condition, certification, lead time, and quantity in ways a range cannot capture. Request a current quote for a real number.

Questions about how a specific number was produced are welcome at legal@honest.aero.