AirIndex is best known for one number per market. Underneath that number is a verification machine working at three altitudes: individual landing facilities below the city, scored markets at the city, and operators, airframes, and observed flights above it. Every count on this page is read live from the production database. Nothing is projected and nothing is rounded up.
Every United States heliport record, independently re-verified. The FAA file is the starting point, never the answer: each record is cross-checked against government terrain data, building footprints, and case documents, then scored for how much it can be trusted.
The visible layer: US metros scored for urban air mobility readiness. What the leaderboard does not show is the discipline underneath it. Scores change only through a human-reviewed audit gate, the methodology is locked by a cryptographic hash, and every score ever produced is preserved.
The layer a leaderboard cannot show: who intends to fly, what the aircraft are claimed and demonstrated to do, and what actually flew. Observed movement data is a floor, never a ceiling; an aircraft that was not seen is recorded as unobserved, not absent.
Five audit tables are append only, enforced by database triggers rather than policy. Each day their new rows are hashed into a Merkle batch, signed by an independent RFC 3161 timestamp authority, and anchored to Bitcoin. You can verify any record without trusting AirIndex.
Counts on this page refresh hourly from production. If a number here disagrees with a claim made anywhere else, trust this page.