The State of the U.S. Heliport Record

Summary

The FAA's Airport Master Record (AMR) 5010, part of the National Airspace System Resources (NASR) dataset, is the authoritative record of the nation's heliports. Operators, planners, insurers, and now advanced-air-mobility programs all rely on it to know where rotorcraft, and increasingly electric vertical-takeoff (eVTOL) aircraft, may be able to operate. We checked that record against independent public datasets. The same four gaps showed up across the whole fleet.

(1) Private-use heliports make up 99% of the total number of heliports in the U.S. and as such there are no requirements for the FAA to reinspect the site or validate the information once the heliport has been activated. Recent policy changes now allow FAA Inspectors to conduct tabletop evaluations of private-use heliports using available satellite and obstruction data rather than conducting on-site evaluations. This is accomplished after a risk assessment of a new site has determined that the heliport represents a low or medium risk. When a high-risk situation is identified the FAA Inspector will then conduct an on-site inspection.

None of this comes from a hidden dataset or a proprietary model. Each gap is a plain disagreement between the FAA record and another publicly available source, found with a check anyone can run on the same files. Put together, they describe a national vertical-flight landing infrastructure record that is stale, inaccurate, incomplete, and almost never independently inspected. That has real consequences for aviation safety and usability, for how this risk gets priced, and for whether the coming AAM build-out is being planned on an accurate and solid foundation.

1 The question

Can the federal record of where aircraft land and take off be trusted enough to make decisions on? For decades the question rarely came up. Helicopters are operated based on a pilot's best judgment. However, under current federal pilot licensing and testing standards, it should be pointed out that pilots are not required to be taught or tested on heliport criteria requirements. This has led to several accidents in the industry that were then blamed on pilot error by NTSB and FAA accident investigators rather than accounting for the root cause, which was substandard infrastructure that did not meet accepted FAA standards.

Therefore, a record that has been allowed to become significantly stale with little to no oversight, or due to a lack of owner-reported information, has perpetuated marginally acceptable and high-risk infrastructure to exist in numerous instances. eVTOL takes what little margin there is away. Automated and semi-automated flight operations assume the landing surface is where the record says it is, the size the record says it is, and is clear of the obstructions and hazards. An old, highly antiquated, and unglamorous dataset is suddenly doing real work, and it is fair to ask how well it holds up.

2 Method

Every finding below compares the FAA record against one independent public source. That choice is deliberate. A finding that reproduces from public files under a stated rule is something an underwriter, a regulator, or a program office can act on. A model output that simply asks to be trusted is not. Hand someone the same files and the same rule, and they will reach the same answer we did.

The scope is the 5,647 FAA-registered U.S. heliports. The analysis is read-only and changes no FAA record. Where a value is derived rather than directly measured, we say so plainly (see Limitations). The dimensional analysis uses FAA-recorded pad dimensions from the NASR dataset; where the underlying record is itself uninspected, the dimension inherits that uncertainty. We call this out explicitly because the dataset contains numerous known errors concerning actual pad size.

3 Finding I. The record is almost never inspected

Each independent Airport Master Record carries two codes: who last verified the facility, and how. Here is what they say across all 5,647 registered heliports.

86 facilities, 1.5 percent, show an independent field inspection on record: 3 federal, 60 state, 23 contractor. The other 5,561, or 98.5 percent, carry inspector code "N." No agency inspected them. The owner furnished the data under the FAA's AMR self-reporting program.

This is not a charge of bad faith. Owner self-reporting is how the AMR program was built to scale. But it does mean the data behind most of the national landing record has never been checked in the field. Not the dimensions, not the obstructions, not whether the pad is still configured the way the file says. For a record now expected to support automated flight, that matters more than anything else in this report.

A note on the "Last Owner Information Date" field: this date does not necessarily indicate when the owner submitted updated information. It normally indicates when the FAA requested information from the owner. There is no clear field in the NASR dataset that captures when the facility data was actually last verified or updated. A recent information-request date can mask geometry that has not been verified in decades.

4 Finding II. The record is incomplete

Matching the federal hospital registry against the FAA record, 1,121 hospitals that report a helipad have no FAA heliport on record within one nautical mile. No registered landing facility at all. Of those, 1,064 are at hospitals that are currently operating. Tightening the match to a half-mile and then a third-mile barely changes the count, which tells us these records are genuinely missing rather than coordinates that failed to line up.

Most of them sit in rural communities and U.S. territories, where a hospital helipad is often the only controlled place a medical-evacuation helicopter can put down for many miles. The federal record shows empty airspace. On the ground, the landing infrastructure is real, and lives depend on it.

One example. Across a 60-nautical-mile stretch of southwest Kansas, the FAA record shows zero landing facilities — a complete landing desert. Six operating hospital helipads sit in that same area, invisible to the federal record.

5 Finding III. The record is stale

Comparing the FAA's recorded elevation against independent USGS terrain turns up a pattern that repeats. Some pads have physically moved, most often from the ground up to a rooftop, and the FAA record was only partly updated to match. In one case we confirmed, a major medical center relocated its helipad to a rooftop in the mid-2000s. The only field the FAA record updated was the latitude and longitude. The elevation still describes the original ground pad, nearly fifty feet below. The recorded elevation, the obstruction picture, and the approach geometry had all quietly drifted away from the real facility.

Elevation is rarely reevaluated once it is filed. So a stale elevation on a pad we can confirm now sits on a rooftop is a reliable fingerprint of this kind of unrecorded change. And it can be found systematically, across the whole fleet.

6 Finding IV. The record misplaces facilities

Cross-referencing FAA-recorded coordinates against independent sources reveals facilities that are not merely undocumented but actively mislocated in the federal record. In some cases the coordinates have been off by 2, 3, 4, and as much as 55 miles. These are not ambiguous near-misses; they are gross mislocations that have persisted since activation.

Worked example: TN60. FAA NASR records Heliport ID TN60 (a television-station helipad in Nashville, TN) at latitude 36.14117, longitude −87.86197. The true facility location, confirmed via FCC public file and US Census geocoder, is latitude 36.13825, longitude −86.86129. The offset is 48.5 nautical miles — almost exactly 1.0° of longitude (−87.862 vs −86.861), the fingerprint of a classic data-entry transposition. Someone entered the wrong longitude degree in 1979, and it has sat uncorrected for 47 years.

The FAA's own record is internally inconsistent: it lists city = Nashville, county = Davidson, but the coordinate plots approximately 48 nautical miles west, outside Davidson County entirely. The facility has never been inspected (inspector code "N"), activated May 1979.

AirIndex's system independently flagged TN60 before the coordinate error was known to us. Our elevation cross-check showed FAA-recorded 650 ft versus USGS 3DEP 532.5 ft at the plotted point — a 117-foot discrepancy, exactly what you would expect when the coordinate is pointing at the wrong terrain. The system caught the symptom without knowing the coordinate was wrong. Two independent checks — geospatial cross-reference and elevation cross-check — converge on the same finding.

This case illustrates that the 1,121 unregistered hospital helipads identified in Finding II exist alongside a separate problem: facilities that are registered but plotted dozens of miles from their actual location. Some hospitals may appear to have no FAA heliport nearby not because the heliport is unregistered, but because it is registered at the wrong coordinates. The two findings are entangled, and disentangling them requires the kind of multi-source cross-referencing this analysis performs.

7 What it means for eVTOL readiness

The four gaps point the same way once you ask whether the existing infrastructure is ready for eVTOL. Of the 5,594 facilities with a measured pad (53 of the 5,647 registered heliports lack recorded dimensions), the median controlling dimension is 48 feet, and 51 percent come in under 50 feet. However, this is assuming the heliport dimensional data in the FAA record is accurate; in numerous cases, heliport dimensions have been found to be incorrect.

Under current criteria, an eVTOL needs a load-bearing final-approach-and-takeoff (FATO) area roughly twice the size of the recorded pad. The standard 2.0-times-reference-dimension rule (per FAA EB-105A) puts typical minimums at 100 feet and up. So the average U.S. heliport pad is about half the size an eVTOL vertiport needs. That number then sits on top of a record that is 98.5 percent uninspected, missing more than a thousand facilities, and in some cases placing registered facilities dozens of miles from their actual location.

The takeaway is not that the infrastructure is necessarily inadequate in many cases. It is that the authoritative record cannot, by itself, tell you whether any given site is adequate. Answering that takes independent verification of each facility against the physical world, which is the work behind this analysis.

8 Why it matters

— Safety and policy. Automated vertical flight is being planned against a landing record that has not been field-verified at scale. The gaps can be closed, but only after they are measured, and now they can be.

— Insurance. Aviation underwriters pricing heliport and emerging eVTOL exposure are working from a record that is self-reported, and in more than a thousand cases simply absent. Physical on-site verification of each facility is a direct input to pricing the risk well.

— AAM build-out. Site-selection and basing decisions that assume the federal record is complete, accurate, and current will misjudge both where landing capacity already exists and where it still has to be built.

9 Limitations and how to verify

— The completeness finding leans on the hospital registry's helipad indicator, a secondary source. It establishes a disagreement between two authoritative records, not an independent site survey.

— Some rooftop heights are derived from the elevation differential rather than directly measured. We label those, and they carry less confidence than a measured value.

— The dimensional conclusion uses FAA-recorded pad dimensions. Where the underlying record is itself uninspected, the dimensional accuracy inherits that uncertainty. That is the point, not a flaw.

— Coordinate-accuracy cases like TN60 are confirmed individually against independent sources. The 48.5 nm offset reproduces from FCC and Census data. Systematic fleet-wide coordinate validation is ongoing.

— This is a records-integrity analysis, not a site-safety audit. It shows where the federal record disagrees with independent evidence. It does not certify or condemn any individual facility.

— Every figure reproduces from the public sources in section 2 under the stated rules. Source records and per-facility detail are available on request.

Prepared by AirIndex (Vertical Data Group). AirIndex maintains an audited, provenance-anchored record of U.S. vertical-lift infrastructure. The figures here are drawn from it and reproduce from the public sources cited above.