One Aircraft Drew the eIPP Map This Week

All 25 tracked markets held this week, and the board is not the news. The news is a single electric airplane. Beta Technologies tail N401NZ, a CX300, left the Vancouver area on August 9 and landed at Houma, Louisiana on August 26, having flown 2,765 miles in 43 legs through 38 airports, with a stop at Galveston along the way. Both ends of that line are federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program sites. Thirty four of the 41 routes the platform has recorded for the first time in the last three weeks belong to this one aircraft, and the platform's own inference layer flagged its landings before anyone told it to look. The news feed, meanwhile, never linked the trip to a market.

Score Changes This Week

All 25 tracked markets held this week. No audited score moves.

Markets to Watch This Week

Top 5 markets by predictive significance, generated from the AirIndex Forward Signals pipeline as of 2026-08-28.

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Industry Snapshot

This week the AirIndex pipeline ingested 358 new filings, processed 508 status changes, and logged 0 market watch updates, for 1086 tracked events in all since 2026-08-21. Below are the developments worth your attention.

No directional regulatory or watch changes surfaced this week.

Two Thousand Seven Hundred Miles, One Airplane

The flight ledger has recorded 41 routes flown for the first time since Issue 19 opened it on August 7. Thirty four of them are the same airframe; the other seven are Beta's Northeast fleet working between Burlington, Concord, Bedford, Nashua, Plymouth, Lebanon, and Martin State. N401NZ is the fourth CX300 built, registered to South Burlington, Vermont, and it has been working its way across the country in hops of 30 to 115 miles: Bellingham, Tacoma, Eugene, Medford, Redding, Stockton, Salinas, Paso Robles, Bakersfield, Palm Springs, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Clovis, Lubbock, Big Spring, San Angelo, Junction, Kerrville, then Kelly Field at Lackland in San Antonio on August 21, Cotulla, Beeville, Palacios, and Galveston on the evening of August 22. It flew two local sorties out of Galveston on August 23, sat out August 24, and on August 25 crossed to Lake Charles and Lafayette. It landed at Houma Terrebonne at 13:19 UTC on August 26 and flew one 47 minute local sortie that afternoon.

No single leg exceeded 115 miles, which is the operating shape of a 336 nautical mile aircraft moving between charging stops rather than a demonstration of range. The legs are also the reason none of these routes carry a corridor identifier yet: the platform mints an identifier only when a pair of endpoints is flown at least twice on at least two days, and a transit crosses each pair once. Identity follows evidence. What the ledger holds instead is a dated, tail level record of where an electric aircraft can currently get to on the ground infrastructure that exists today, and that record is public in this issue for the first time.

Both Ends of the Line Are Federal Test Sites

Galveston is the Texas project of the FAA and U.S. DOT eVTOL Integration Pilot Program. Texas DOT, the City of Galveston, and the FAA announced on August 18 that Beta would fly the CX300 out of Scholes International for about three weeks, connecting Galveston, Sugar Land, and Brenham. Houma is the Louisiana project, the Bristow Group base that Beta and Bristow named last year as the home for electric aircraft serving the Gulf offshore market. A plane spotter logged N401NZ into Houma on August 26, the same day and place the ledger shows.

The observed record and the press release diverge on the Texas leg. The announcement said flights would start August 18. The transponder shows the aircraft arriving four days later, flying two sorties, and leaving after three days on the ground. It shows no leg to Sugar Land and no leg to Brenham. That is not proof the Texas campaign did not happen as described: experimental aircraft may legally fly without broadcasting, another airframe could be flying it, and a missing track is recorded as unobserved. It is an observation that the Texas program, as of this morning, has produced two sorties in the public record and the Louisiana program has produced one. Joby has said its Dallas area eIPP flights begin in September. When they do, this ledger will be the first place their cadence is counted rather than announced.

The Ledger This Week

Seventy four observed flights across ten airframes on six flying days, against 81 the week before. Beta flew 54 of them, 48 on the CX300 and six on the A250, most of it the Plattsburgh and Burlington pattern that has anchored this ledger every week. Archer logged eleven at Salinas, holding the eleven a week pace the last two issues reported. Joby logged nine at Marina, its busiest week since the ledger opened, after a single flight the week before. Ten routes were flown for the first time since last Friday, all ten by N401NZ.

The standing caveat applies. Observed flight is a floor, never a census.

The Engine Caught the Landings

Issue 21 introduced the inference layer that reads FAA obstruction cases, the facility record, and the flight ledger together and opens dated situations at named facilities. This week it opened 16 and closed four, leaving 32 open. Fourteen of the new ones are construction pressure, seven of them high: Houston Methodist and Texas Children's downtown each picked up two crane cases within a quarter mile, Baptist Hospital in Miami one, Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey one at 300 feet and a twentieth of a mile. The Lexington cluster from last week is still open, seven cranes near the UK Patient Care pad and five near UK Hospital.

The other two are the ones worth reading twice. The layer opened an activity meets gap situation at the University of Texas Medical Branch emergency room pad in Galveston: six observed eVTOL flights within fifteen nautical miles in thirty days, nearest endpoint Scholes at five miles, against a pad on record at 35 feet, under the 50 foot landing footprint the current generation of eVTOL aircraft needs. It opened a second at Ochsner St. Anne General Hospital in Raceland, Louisiana: three flights, nearest endpoint Houma at ten miles, pad on record at 40 feet. Those six and three flights are N401NZ. Nobody tagged the aircraft, the program, or the airports. The rules fired on the ledger and the federal facility record alone, and they landed on the two eIPP hubs the aircraft had just visited.

The platform processed 2,100 FAA obstruction determinations since last Friday. The 74 machine calls Issue 21 reported have grown to 119 open, 86 on obstruction follow through, 27 on construction clusters, six on operator cadence. None has resolved. The first windows close September 16, and the hit rate will be reported when they do, misses included.

What the Scoreboard Did Not See

The news layer ingested 545 records this week. Not one of the Texas or Louisiana eIPP stories attached to a tracked market or produced a scoring event. That is partly by design: the classifier is built to refuse credit for a test flight unless the source names a designated program, a guard added in April after a single Bay Area demo generated five pilot program claims in four days. It held here, and the cost of holding is that Houston, whose metro the aircraft flew through and whose hospital pads the engine flagged, sits at 53 with a score last published June 9. Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio have not repriced since the same run.

Seven overrides did reach the audit gate this week, none published: two Florida pilot program claims for Tampa, Joby's September Texas flights mapped to San Antonio, Wisk vertiport work mapped to San Francisco, an Illinois regulatory posture read for Chicago, and one Detroit item the classifier could not resolve to any tracked market. Archer and AEG's L.A. Live vertiport announcement on August 24 was logged as an operator outcome and moved nothing, because Los Angeles already carries full credit on the factors it touches.

So the week's honest summary is this. The scoreboard, which only moves on audited evidence, held. The transponder record, which moves whenever an aircraft broadcasts, drew a line from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf of Mexico and put an electric airplane at two federal test sites. The gap between those two records is where the next score changes will come from, and it is the reason this digest reports both.

UAM Market Pulse is a weekly intelligence digest from AirIndex. Forward signals are derived from the AirIndex Forward Signals pipeline aggregating classifier outputs, MarketWatch trajectory, and predevelopment facility milestones.

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