Publications
Intelligence for Advanced Air Mobility.
Findings, market readiness, and infrastructure analysis — covering operational readiness, regulatory movement, facility viability, and where the record can be trusted.
Featured Research · Jun 28, 2026
Emergency Landing for eVTOL: The Infrastructure That Doesn't Exist
The emergency is a when, not an if. When it comes, an eVTOL needs somewhere to land, and the infrastructure for that mostly does not exist. We modeled it two ways on a real flight, JFK to Manhattan. First, reach: in a total power loss at 1500 feet, a helicopter can glide to a safe landing site over roughly 9 percent of the route, an eVTOL with wings over roughly 5 percent, and a multirotor over close to none. Then, usability: of 5,594 measured U.S. helipads, only about 30 percent are large enough to take a typical eVTOL as they exist today, and that is before the load bearing and obstruction gates that usually bind. Reach times usability means the usable emergency landing coverage for an eVTOL on a real corridor barely exists. This is not a glide circle problem. It is a whole system gap, and it is measurable now, before routes are declared operable.
Read the analysis →The Scoreboard · Live track record
Every forward call we publish, scored.
8 published forward calls, each tracked to resolution against primary-source events — 2 validated so far.
Research
In-depth analysis and findings on the AAM record
Research·Jun 14, 2026
The Registry Gap Has a Paper Trail
Earlier this month we reported that more than 1,100 hospital helipads operate in the United States with no FAA registration. The finding came from cross referencing two public datasets, and it left one question open: does the FAA simply not know these pads exist? We can now answer that for a quarter of them. We ingested the FAA's full archive of airspace case files, 483,006 cases reaching back decades, and matched every landing area case against the facility registry. For 284 of those unregistered hospital helipads, the FAA has its own paperwork on file: an aeronautical study, conducted and determined, at that exact location. The registry gap is not an awareness problem. It is a reconciliation problem inside the federal record itself.
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Research·Jun 6, 2026
Permission Isn't Readiness: The v2.0 Market Readiness Score
AirIndex has moved its 25-market readiness score to a new methodology, v2.0. Where v1.3 weighted regulatory permission at roughly 45% of the score and treated infrastructure and operators as present/absent flags, v2.0 rebalances around four co-equal pillars — regulatory authority, demand, landing capacity, and operator commitment — plus two modulators, momentum and operability. It now scores whether a market is permitted, demanded, landable, and being committed to, all at once. The result is more conservative and, we believe, more honest: no U.S. metro currently clears the ADVANCED tier, and Los Angeles leads. The full methodology is published, and every score change is explained on the market itself.
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Research·Jun 3, 2026
The State of the U.S. Heliport Record
The FAA's Airport Master Record is the authoritative account of where the nation's helicopters — and soon eVTOL aircraft — can land. We checked it against independent public datasets and found four systematic gaps. The record is almost never independently inspected (98.5% of U.S. heliports are owner-self-reported). It is incomplete: 1,121 hospital helipads have no FAA heliport on file within a nautical mile. It is stale, with pads that moved to rooftops while the record updated only in part. And it misplaces facilities — one Nashville heliport has been plotted 48.5 nautical miles from its true location since 1979. Every finding is reproducible from public sources, and the implications reach aviation safety, insurance underwriting, and the coming advanced-air-mobility build-out.
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Research·May 20, 2026
The $16.6 Billion Infrastructure Gap: A 12-Claim Cross-Reference
NEXA Advisors / UAM Geomatics published a $16.6 billion infrastructure forecast for AAM through 2045 in March 2026. The paper's three-pillar framing names AirIndex's pillar in print: 'live measurement of Pillar 3, Infrastructure Deployment.' This is a cross-reference, not a critique — twelve claims dispositioned across four categories (validate, refine, reframe, coverage gap), with AIX-IDs and methodology citations where the substrate has resolution to add. Three observations carry weight: the 1,400-heliport remediation assumption is the largest refinement target; state regulatory recognition is the binding constraint in several named MSAs even when capital is available; and the per-site CAPEX bands have a decomposition axis the paper's methodology doesn't expose.
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One Market Monday
One-market readiness briefings · Mondays
OMM Report·Jun 28, 2026
Phoenix Throws Off the Fifth Most Signal in the Country. Almost None of It Is Local.
Phoenix Metro
PhoenixView Report →
OMM Report·Jun 21, 2026
Tampa's Momentum Hit the Model's Ceiling. Its Operator Pillar Is Still Zero.
Tampa Bay
TampaView Report →
OMM Report·Jun 7, 2026
Denver Tripled to 34. Nothing in Denver Changed.
Denver Metro
DenverView Report →
Pulse
Weekly industry signal report · Fridays
Pulse Report·Jul 16, 2026
Pulse #18 — The aircraft are at Oshkosh; twelve markets have no operator
With the industry gathered at Oshkosh, the board held flat and Los Angeles kept the lead at 72, while the operator presence reading came in at zero for twelve of the twenty five tracked markets: aircraft on display, but no operator on the ground in nearly half the map.
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Pulse Report·Jul 9, 2026
Pulse #17 — Not every “AAM law” is a law
A read of every advanced air mobility measure by instrument type finds the enacted column dominated by non-binding resolutions: Florida's H1093 vertiport statute is the clearest binding law of the cycle, while Arizona's bills to create and fund an AAM office both failed.
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Pulse Report·Jul 2, 2026
Pulse #16 — The Texas Triangle turns to Negative Watch
Four weeks after moving to Positive Watch, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin all flipped to Negative Watch in a single cycle as the interior Sun Belt cools, while 24 of 25 published scores held.
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Monthly Reports
System-level AAM infrastructure intelligence
Monthly Report
May 2026 Monthly Brief
After April's federal cluster, May returned to state-level signals. Four markets moved on legislation and regulatory posture; federal follow-on did not materialize.
May 30, 2026View Report →
Monthly Report
April 2026 Monthly Brief
Score movements, methodology adjustments, and structural reads across all 25 markets for April.
Apr 29, 2026View Report →
Monthly Report
March 2026 Monthly Brief
Inaugural monthly brief — methodology v1.3 launch, San Francisco's +35 surge, Joby–Blade consolidation.
Mar 30, 2026View Report →
Methodology & Reference
How the scores are built
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