Autonomous flight trusts the data. AirIndex verifies it's worth trusting.
AutonomousReady is a per-facility, machine-readable verdict an autonomous aircraft consumes before it ever leaves the ground — a single GO / CAUTION / NO-GO it can act on, with every check and its provenance attached. Its ground-infrastructure NOTAM.
A pilot's eyes are a verification layer. Autonomy has none.
A human pilot catches the wrong coordinate, the undersized pad, the crane on short final. They are the real-time verification layer that makes a stale or mistaken FAA record survivable. An autonomous aircraft has no eyes — it flies what the data says.
So every gap in the landing record that is a nuisance to a pilot becomes an accident risk to a machine. Our audit of the U.S. heliport record found these gaps are not rare:
The fix isn't more aircraft sensors — it's a record the aircraft can trust before it commits. That's what AutonomousReady delivers, drawn from the work behind the state of the U.S. heliport record.
One call. A verdict it can act on.
No narrative, no risk prose — a deterministic verdict, every underlying check exposed as a machine-readable pass/fail.
Operational, the record is trusted, dimensions meet the current standard, the obstruction environment is clear, and an emergency diversion is within reach. Clear to plan against.
Flyable, but degraded — below-standard dimensions, an elevated obstruction environment, an unverified or stale record, or a weak emergency fallback. Derate or confirm against your airframe.
A hard safety blocker — the facility is closed, the coordinate is suspect, the record is fundamentally untrustworthy, or the approach surface is penetrated. Do not dispatch.
How the verdict is made
A deterministic gate — not a black-box score. NO-GO trips only on an unambiguous safety blocker. Anything degraded-but-flyable is a CAUTION. The gate is aircraft-agnostic: pad dimensions travel with the verdict as information — the controlling dimension and FATO gap — but they don't gate it, because every legacy helipad is smaller than the eVTOL FATO envelope by definition. You derate against your own airframe.
NO-GO — HARD BLOCKERS
CAUTION — DEGRADED
The six checks behind every verdict
The proof is in the provenance
Every verdict carries a provenance block — what's verified, what's assumed, and what's unknown across inspection, geometry, structure, dimensions, and location. A machine doesn't just get an answer; it gets the basis for the answer and can set its own tolerance.
And the verdict itself is hash-locked. Every response cites a methodology version and a cryptographic fingerprint, so the rule that produced it is reproducible and tamper-evident — the chain-of-custody an autonomous-operations or defense program requires.
Built on a substrate no one else has
AutonomousReady isn't a new model — it's a composition of intelligence layers AirIndex already maintains across 5,692 U.S. heliports, refreshed daily and cross-referenced against terrain, structures, and the federal record.
Who it's for
AutonomousReady is an API product on the AirIndex substrate, gated to institutional and enterprise tiers. The human-facing facility assessment is open at Helipad Check.
Inquiries: sales@airindex.io