When we first scored 25 U.S. markets for urban air mobility readiness, we weighted the thing that was easiest to verify and hardest to fake: the regulatory record. Enacted legislation, regulatory posture, vertiport zoning. Roughly 45% of a market's score came from whether it was permitted.
That was the right place to start — reproducible, defensible, honest about what we could verify. But it had two structural blind spots we couldn't keep ignoring. It never scored demand — whether the flights actually had anywhere to go. And it never scored operability — how many days you could actually fly. A market could be fully permitted and fully zoned and score near the top while having a weak trip base and weather that grounds operations a third of the year. Permission was standing in for readiness. They are not the same thing.
What v2.0 measures
v2.0 keeps everything v1.3 measured and rebalances it around a single question: how real, and how near, is commercial eVTOL here? Four co-equal pillars, eighteen points each:
- Regulatory authority — the legal permission to operate. Still essential. No longer dominant: pulled from ~45% of the score to 18%.
- Demand — why anyone flies here. Metro population and medevac density, as the first cut at a real demand signal.
- Landing capacity — not how many heliports a market has, but how much of its assessed landing stock could actually be converted to an eVTOL standard, computed facility by facility.
- Operator commitment — the truest signal that this is actually happening, because operators commit capital to the markets they've judged ready. Graded by depth, not a yes/no flag.
And two modulators, fourteen points each — momentum (is the market moving or has it stalled?) and operability (how many days can you fly?). The pillars are conjunctive: a market reaches the top tier only when it is permitted, demanded, landable, and being committed to — all four at once. No single pillar carries a market anymore.
Why you can trust the number
We built this system. No one else scores these markets, and no one outside it dictates the scores — the data does. Every factor is computed from public records and our own audited engines: FAA databases, state and federal filings, the conversion-feasibility model, the operator intelligence database, station weather climatology. The full methodology is published. The spec is hashed. Anyone with the same inputs should arrive at the same number.
We didn't tune v2.0 to flatter anyone or to move any particular market up or down. We tuned it so each factor faithfully reflects its data, and we validated it against v1.3 in the background before a single public number moved. v1.3 isn't erased — every score we published under it keeps its original methodology hash and stays in the record. v2.0 is a new, separately hashed version, and the day we switched is a recorded event.
What moved
The headline isn't a market — it's the absence of one. Under v2.0, no U.S. metro scores in the ADVANCED tier. v1.3 had five. That's not a downgrade of the country's progress; it's an honest accounting of what "ready" requires when you score demand, landing capacity, and operator commitment alongside permission — and require all four together.
- Los Angeles is #1 (72, MODERATE). It has the largest trip base of any tracked metro, two manufacturers flight-testing, and the exclusive LA28 Olympic air-taxi partnership anchoring real infrastructure investment. It leads — but it doesn't clear ADVANCED, because no one is operating commercially yet.
- The former flagships fall to MODERATE. Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, San Francisco, and Orlando all leave ADVANCED. Under v1.3, strong legislation and zoning could carry a market to the top; under v2.0 they can't, because permission isn't the same as a market that's happening.
- Demand- and operability-rich metros rise. Denver, Washington D.C., Seattle, and Minneapolis climb as the model starts counting the things v1.3 ignored — population, medevac density, flyable days.
One correction is worth naming, because it's how this is supposed to work. Our first pass had Miami narrowly ahead of LA, on an operator record that tagged a manufacturer as running commercial operations in Miami. It isn't — that's an acquired helicopter network, not certified eVTOL service. We corrected the record, and LA moved to where the real data puts it. The number is only as good as the evidence under it, and the evidence is the product.
Every market's score history now carries the reason it changed, in context — a methodology note showing the move from its v1.3 number to its v2.0 number, and a link to the full methodology. The number changed, and the why changed with it.