The audit
One real day of New York helicopter traffic — 82
aircraft, 382 flights, 47,028 km
flown (1.2× around the Earth) — ADS-B,
hash-pinned. Each flight is re-flown on paper by an eVTOL and decided by interval arithmetic.
This is the exact traffic the industry intends to replace: Joby owns Blade's NYC helicopter
routes (acquired Aug 2025, flying today), and flew its first JFK–Manhattan eVTOL demos from
these same heliports in April 2026. Click any aircraft — its certificate opens on the left.
Honest boundaries
The corpus is what the receiver network saw; coverage gaps and truncated
tracks are flagged per flight. The audit is counterfactual arithmetic over stated boxes
(quality-flagged in the repo; Eve publishes least, so Eve needs data most). FAA = the 20-min VFR helicopter tier; EASA = the 5-min final reserve, a NECESSARY condition only.
Ambient layer = all other traffic, decor only. Data ©
adsb.lol
contributors (ODbL). Rerun everything:
apps/skyaudit.
Methodology, sources and boundaries, citable:
the companion note.
This day, under the selection
The day
flights in the air by hour · peak at 17:00 local
Hardest-working aircraft
🥇 N408GG — HFS HELI III LLC (B407) 18 legs · 6.5 h · 🥈 N62ZA — 62ZA LLC (B407) 13 legs · 5.1 h · 🥉 N777ZA — 777ZA LLC (B407) 13 legs · 4.5 h
names: FAA registry (registered to — not necessarily who operates) / ANAC RAB (operador); both pinned
Records
longest 720 km (N406TD, HFS HELI V LLC) ·
342 min airborne (N866M, tour loop) ·
highest 6850 ft (H60) ·
fastest 160 kt median (S76)
What was flying (inferred)
charter/other 177 · tour loop 130 · shuttle hop 43 · patrol/military 32
Measured outliers
widest orbit: 18-20990 (H60) flew
72.3× its direct distance · longest hoverer: N27M
under 10 kt for 46% of a 96-min flight
SKYFORECAST — FORECASTS, NOT VERDICTS
Everything else on this page is DECIDED from a day
that happened. This card is different in kind and drawn differently on purpose: interval
FORECASTS for days that have not happened, committed to an append-only ledger (sha-pinned,
timestamped BEFORE the day) and scored in exact arithmetic when the day's data is released.
Wrong forecasts stay on the ledger forever — that permanence is the point. The coverage claim
is a conformal counting theorem under a stated hypothesis (days exchangeable within the
weekday/weekend group), never model faith.
2026-08-28 · flights
committed 2026-08-27T22:26Z · sha e4dc29f5d5 · proved coverage 2/4 (grows with the corpus)
[377, 397]
2026-08-28 · eflyable
committed 2026-08-27T22:26Z · sha 74b3bccc4d · proved coverage 2/4 (grows with the corpus) committed under methodology v1; will be scored against the v2-defined outcome and likely bust — the ledger never rewrites, and the miss will say why
[46, 51]
2026-08-31 · flights
committed 2026-08-28T00:22Z · sha e4dc29f5d5 · proved coverage 2/4 (grows with the corpus)
[377, 397]
2026-08-31 · eflyable
committed 2026-08-28T00:22Z · sha fb0771ffca · proved coverage 2/4 (grows with the corpus)
[100, 127]
2026-09-01 · flights
committed 2026-08-28T03:54Z · sha fa871e3d48 · proved coverage 3/5 (grows with the corpus)
[191, 397]
2026-09-01 · eflyable
committed 2026-08-28T03:54Z · sha b2ea75536d · proved coverage 3/5 (grows with the corpus)
[49, 127]
2026-09-02 · flights
committed 2026-08-28T03:54Z · sha fa871e3d48 · proved coverage 3/5 (grows with the corpus)
[191, 397]
2026-09-02 · eflyable
committed 2026-08-28T03:54Z · sha b2ea75536d · proved coverage 3/5 (grows with the corpus)
[49, 127]
lifetime record, recomputed from the ledger at this build:
8 committed · 0 scored · 0 covered — the first outcomes arrive with the next day releases.
Ledger:
skyaudit-forecast-ledger.jsonl ·
instrument: instruments/forecast (conformal coverage proved by exact rank-lemma enumeration;
the ledger refuses backdating, tampering, premature and double scoring).
The electric bill
This day's helicopters burned 56,579–78,610 L
of Jet-A — $73,552–$165,081,
141.4–200.5 tonnes of CO₂.
The 100 provably-electric flights:
$290–$2056 of electricity vs
$3,966–$9,902
of fuel for the same flights — the cost intervals don't overlap: the electric worst case beats the fuel best case. 7.6–12 t CO₂ avoided.
Fuel from per-type class burn boxes (stated estimates);
electricity from the certified energy enclosures — decided, not projected.
Fleet designer — every position is a proof
If the reserve rule were…
If charging took…
Battery and reserve apply to the aircraft selected
above; charging applies to the Beta ALIA fleet re-flying its provable day. Each slider position
looks up a precomputed, gate-checked certified point.
Re-fly the day — fleet frontier
Beta ALIA
100 provable legs · witness 18:11:44 ET · pool model, FAA 20-min
exactly 10 aircraft
Joby S4
zero provable legs under FAA 20-min
no certifiable fleet
Archer Midnight
zero provable legs under FAA 20-min
no certifiable fleet
Eve EVE-100
zero provable legs under FAA 20-min
no certifiable fleet
Range claims, audited
A range claim is EXISTENTIAL — CONSISTENT means
some point of the maker's own public+assumed boxes achieves it. A worst-case guarantee is
UNIVERSAL and gets the worst corner.
Joby S4
100 mi range including energy reserves (evtol.news attributing Joby)
CONSISTENT
Archer Midnight
up to 100 mi (Archer PR)
CONSISTENT
Archer Midnight
guaranteed minimum 60 mi in the worst case condition (evtol.news attributing Archer)
UNDECIDABLE
Eve EVE-100
designed for 100 km range (Eve institutional presentation, May 2026)
CONSISTENT
Beta ALIA
no published VTOL-variant range claim to audit (336 nm demonstrated is the CTOL variant)
NO CLAIM
Flight planner — a plan that comes with a proof
the graph is a hand-simplified rendering of the published corridor structure; distances are corridor path lengths over this graph; the energy verdicts on planned routes are the same certified interval decisions as everywhere else in the app - GO/NO-GO here means the ENERGY question only, decided as a mathematically certified enclosure; it is not an operational clearance.