Intelligence for Advanced Air Mobility.

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.

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.

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.

Phoenix Volatility: Reading a 15-Point Move Inside a Tier

On May 10 2026, AirIndex's score for Phoenix moved from 50 to 65 — a 15-point intra-tier acceleration anchored to two simultaneous Arizona legislative signals: SB1819 passing Senate consent calendar (vertiport zoning) and SB1457 advancing on a Do Pass recommendation (air mobility fund). Tier transitions are the predictive layer's headline events, but intra-tier movement is structurally distinct: it reads the price of acceleration within a regulatory regime, not the boundary crossing into a new one. The Phoenix case is the cleanest worked example to date of the methodology detecting compound legislative signal density inside a single capture window. This piece traces the structural read against platform data and logs a forward call on the next Arizona-AAM signal.

Denver Tripled to 34. Nothing in Denver Changed.

Denver Metro

Columbus Ranks #4 in Signal Velocity, Scores 25

Columbus Metro

Austin's Signal Surge Outpaces Its Operator Vacuum

Austin Metro

Pulse #13 — 2,678 heliports changed risk tier; nothing on the ground changed

After ingesting the FAA's full airspace case archive, 61% of U.S. heliports now carry their determination history and 2,678 facilities changed risk tier — with nothing physical changed on the ground.

Pulse #12 — 98.5% of U.S. heliports have never been independently inspected

An independent audit of all 5,647 U.S. heliports finds 98.5% have no record of an agency field inspection. Reviewed by Rex Alexander, FRAeS, chair of NFPA 418.

Pulse #11 — Tier IV Texas deploys $42M in San Antonio

Texas at Tier IV deploys $42M in San Antonio — the capital path and the licensure path are decoupled.

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.

April 2026 Monthly Brief

Score movements, methodology adjustments, and structural reads across all 25 markets for April.

March 2026 Monthly Brief

Inaugural monthly brief — methodology v1.3 launch, San Francisco's +35 surge, Joby–Blade consolidation.

Scoring Methodology v1.3

7-factor scoring model, factor weights, tier definitions, and missing-data protocol — fully published.