Texas Flew Its First Program Flights From Fort Worth This Week. Dallas Moved Three Points Overnight.
On Wednesday morning the U.S. Transportation Secretary, a senator, and a TxDOT commissioner stood on the ramp at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport and opened Project Nexus, the Texas entry in the federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, with a Joby aircraft in the air. Texas is the sixth site to fly under the program. Dallas's nightly score had read 65 every morning since August 12. It read 67 on Thursday and 68 on Friday and Saturday.
Three points overnight is a large move for this index. The published Dallas score is 64, MODERATE, third of 25, set at the June 9 methodology cutover and unchanged since. The nightly reading now sits four above it, and every one of those four points comes from two places: momentum, 3.7 at publish and 7.5 this morning, and a fifth of a point on the landing pillar. Demand, regulatory, operator, and operability read exactly what they read in June.
The platform had the story before the ceremony. Its observed operations layer logged the first Joby S4 movement at Alliance on September 2, three more local flights on September 7, and on September 8 the Situation Engine opened three findings at hospital pads within six nautical miles of the airport: electric aircraft activity arriving around landing facilities whose pads are thirty and forty feet on the federal record, under the fifty foot floor an eVTOL needs. On Saturday the same aircraft flew Alliance to DFW and back, eighteen miles each way.
Two things the record gets wrong, and they run in opposite directions. San Antonio's signal count for the month is 42, fifth in the index by velocity, and all 42 are this week's Fort Worth coverage tagged to four Texas markets at once. And the Dallas operator column names one company, Wisk, whose aircraft did not fly this week, while the operator with the only Texas base and the only aircraft in the air is not on it.
What flew, and where
Texas was selected for the federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program in March. TxDOT runs the state's entry as Project Nexus, a three year program that starts with aircraft carrying no passengers, moves to medical and cargo flights between rural and urban centers, and ends with passenger service across the Texas Triangle. The industry list is long: Joby, Archer, BETA, Wisk, Bell, Textron, Merlin, Lift, and Metro Aviation are all named partners. The first phase opened on September 10 at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, with Secretary Duffy, Senator Cruz, Commissioner Alvis, and Ross Perot Jr. on the ramp, and a Joby aircraft flying the demonstration.
Joby's campaign runs September 10 through 14 out of its new 45,000 square foot base at Alliance, with published stops at the DFW corporate aviation ramp, Arlington, and Toyota's North American headquarters in Plano. No passengers are carried. The flights collect data and validate routes for the FAA. The same day, the charging consortium Archer and BETA formed with Macquarie announced it will bring its shared charging standard to Texas airports and fixed base operators to support the program, with the Texas Triangle as the stated network. That is the week in one paragraph: a federal program opened, a manufacturer flew from a base it now leases, and the charging layer said it would follow.
The score moved because the coverage moved. The feed classified 56 items touching Dallas between Wednesday and Saturday. Nineteen are specific to Dallas–Fort Worth: the Fort Worth Report, the Dallas Morning News, WFAA, NBC 5, Fox 4, Community Impact, CultureMap, and Fort Worth Inc. all filed from Alliance. Thirty seven are the statewide version of the same event, tagged to Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio together, because a Business Wire release headlined Texas does not say which airport. Momentum counts the rows. It went from 5.2 on Wednesday morning to 7.3 on Thursday to 7.5 on Friday, and that is the three points.
The platform saw it on September 2
The observed operations layer reads registered electric aircraft movements from a commercial flight data feed and ties them to airports. On September 2 it logged a ten minute local flight at Alliance by a Joby S4 registered in Santa Cruz, tail N545JX. That is the first electric aircraft movement the layer has recorded at Alliance since a BETA CX300 passed through in March 2025. The same Joby aircraft flew three local sorties on September 7, one on the 9th, one on the 10th, and on Saturday the 12th made the round trip to DFW: eleven minutes out, eighteen minutes back, eighteen statute miles each way. A BETA CX300 registered in Vermont arrived from Waco on September 8, 95 miles in 46 minutes, and flew locally on the 10th. Ten movements in eleven days at an airport that had none in the eighteen months before.
Those movements are why the Situation Engine acted before the ceremony. On the morning of September 8 it opened three findings, all high severity, at hospital pads inside fifteen nautical miles of the activity: Texas Health Methodist Alliance, four nautical miles from the airport, with a 40 foot pad on the federal record; Parkway Surgical Hospital in Fort Worth, six nautical miles, also 40 feet; and Medical Center North Hills in North Richland Hills, 30 feet, ten nautical miles from DFW. The finding type is activity meets gap: electric aircraft are now operating around landing facilities that cannot take one, because the pad dimension on record is under the 50 foot final approach and takeoff area an eVTOL requires. All three are open this morning and have been re-confirmed by the engine every night since.
None of that is in the score. The landing pillar reads convertible facility share, and a hospital pad at 40 feet is not convertible until something about it changes. The score saw the coverage on Thursday. The facility layer saw the aircraft on the 2nd and drew the consequence on the 8th. That ordering is the platform doing what it is built to do, and it is the part of this week a planner in Tarrant County can actually use.
Seventy facilities, and the county line runs the wrong way
The federal record holds 70 landing facilities for the Dallas–Fort Worth market. Two are public use: the Garland/DFW Heloplex and the Colonel Bobby Waddle pad in DeSoto. They are also the only two with an inspection on record, both in November 2024. The other 68 have no inspection date at all. Thirty eight carry a hospital, medical center, or health system name; eleven serve designated trauma centers. Fifteen sit on building roofs. Three hold an ELEVATED risk tier under the RiskIndex audit: the Dallas/Fort Worth Medical Center pad in Grand Prairie, HEB Hospital in Bedford, and Texas Health Presbyterian in Plano. Ten carry a data integrity suspect flag, meaning the federal coordinates do not agree with what the platform can verify on the ground. One, Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children downtown, is closed indefinitely.
Thirty of the 70 are in Tarrant County. Twenty five are in Dallas County. The market is named for Dallas, the program flew from Fort Worth, Joby's base is in Fort Worth, and the pads the Situation Engine flagged are in Fort Worth and North Richland Hills. The one piece of purpose built vertical infrastructure the region had, the convention center vertiport downtown, closed in July 2025 for the convention center rebuild and is not due to reopen until 2029. Dallas–Fort Worth is one market in this index and one airspace to the FAA, but the landing inventory that matters for the next three years of Project Nexus is on the Tarrant side of the line, and the score does not know that.
San Antonio, fifth by velocity, on flights 270 miles away
Here is the other side of the four city tag. San Antonio has 42 signals in the last 30 days, which ranks it fifth of 25 markets by velocity. All 42 are Texas statewide rows. Not one is about San Antonio. Its published score is 46, EARLY, twelfth, set August 14. Its nightly reading went from 45 on Wednesday to 46 on Thursday, a point of momentum earned on rows about Fort Worth, and Austin and Houston each moved a point the same morning on the same rows. A reader looking at the velocity table sees San Antonio surging. What surged was Fort Worth.
San Antonio has a real asset that the feed almost never sees. Over the last 90 days the platform holds six signals specific to the market, and all six are one story: Port San Antonio is designing a 40,000 square foot vertiport terminal on its campus with SkyGrid, the Boeing airspace unit, as a test and demonstration site for autonomous aircraft, with a taxiway extension and access road due by the end of the year and the terminal design not yet final. SkyGrid is one of the three Boeing units in the Archer transaction that also carries Wisk, the deal this brief covered from the Houston side two issues ago. TxDOT names San Antonio for the program's later phases, medical and cargo first, passengers last. San Antonio has never been the subject of this brief. When its turn in Project Nexus arrives, it will be, and the count that matters then will be the six, not the 42.
Signal Event
On September 10 TxDOT opened Project Nexus, the Texas entry in the federal eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport, with U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Senator Ted Cruz, and Texas Transportation Commissioner Steven Alvis in attendance and a Joby aircraft flying the demonstration. Joby's flight campaign runs through September 14 from its new 45,000 square foot base at Alliance, with stops at DFW, Arlington, and Plano and no passengers aboard. The platform's observed operations layer recorded the Joby S4's first Alliance movement on September 2 and its Alliance to DFW round trip on September 12; the Situation Engine opened three activity meets gap findings at nearby hospital pads on September 8.
Why it matters
This is the first time in the index's history that the score, the observed operations layer, and the Situation Engine have all moved on the same event in the same week, and they moved in the right order: aircraft first, facility consequence second, coverage third. The score read the coverage and added three points of momentum. The facility layer read the aircraft and told three hospitals that electric traffic is now operating around pads too small to receive it. A market brief that only reported the three points would have reported the least useful of the three readings.
What the four points are made of, and who is missing from the record
The publication policy publishes a nightly move to the public score when it is at least two points and backed by a pillar move, or crosses a tier line, or carries a triggering high confidence override. Momentum is not a pillar. It is a time varying modulator, and a move carried by momentum alone is held as recompute noise no matter how large. Dallas's gap to published is four points: 3.8 of them momentum, 0.2 landing. The landing move is small but it is a pillar move, so the four qualifies on the letter of the policy. Whether it publishes is a desk decision, and the desk's question is whether 3.8 points of momentum earned in one week of coverage of one event should become the public number, or whether the momentum should be allowed to do what momentum does, which is decay. The next methodology version counts distinct documents rather than copies, which is the honest fix for a week like this one. Until it ships, 64 stands, and the nightly 68 is visible on the platform as a staged reading.
The second thing the record gets wrong is the operator column. Dallas's operator pillar reads 7.2 of 18, and the seed checklist behind it names one company: Wisk, credited with test operations near DFW and marked, in March, as the only operator active in the region. Wisk is a named Project Nexus partner and its aircraft may well fly here in a later phase. But the company that leased a base at Alliance in August, put an aircraft on the ramp on September 2, and flew the demonstration on September 10 is Joby, and Joby does not appear in the Dallas operator record at all. The multiple operators row reads missing. As of Saturday's DFW round trip, that row is wrong, and the correction goes through the audit gate as a scored override with the observed movements and the September 10 release attached. When it publishes, it will show in the change feed, and it will be the first operator commitment in this index evidenced by the aircraft rather than the press release.
What to Watch
The platform projects no high confidence score change for Dallas in the next 30 days. Four things would change that or change what the current number means.
1. Whether momentum holds after the 14th
Joby's published campaign ends September 14. If the Dallas specific coverage stops, momentum starts to decay from 7.5 and the nightly reading drifts back toward 65 within weeks. If Joby keeps flying from Alliance after the campaign, the observed operations layer will show it whether or not anyone writes it up, and that is the better signal.
2. A second operator on the Alliance ramp
BETA's CX300 arrived from Waco on September 8 and flew locally on the 10th. Archer and Wisk are named program partners. Any of the three putting an aircraft into the observed record at Alliance, Arlington, or DFW in the next 30 days is the fact that converts the multiple operators row from missing to achieved, worth points in the operator pillar that no press release can supply.
3. The three hospital pads
Texas Health Methodist Alliance, Parkway Surgical, and Medical Center North Hills are open findings. A pad extension filing, an FAA obstruction case for a new final approach surface, or a hospital flight program statement about electric traffic would each close or escalate a finding. So would a fourth pad being drawn in as flight activity spreads toward DFW and Arlington.
4. Arlington's World Cup vertiport
Arlington set a goal of a working vertiport at its municipal airport for the 2026 World Cup, and Joby's campaign lists Arlington as a stop. A site filing, a permit, or a first observed eVTOL movement at Arlington Municipal is the first fact in years that would register on the Dallas landing pillar, which today counts 70 facilities and two public use pads.
Final Take
When this brief last wrote about Dallas in April, the old model had it at 95 and tied for first. The June cutover took it to 64 and third, and it has not moved since. This week it moved, on the first real flying the market has ever had, and the move was three points of momentum on a week of headlines. The aircraft, the base, and the three hospital pads are the durable part.
The number to watch is not 68. It is whether the observed record at Alliance still shows a Joby S4 flying on September 21, a week after the cameras leave. If it does, Dallas has an operator. If it does not, it has a memory of one, and the record will say Wisk.
