How we rank US private-jet airports

What this is

Each month, AceJet publishes a ranking of the 50 US airports with the most private-jet arrivals. Teterboro almost always leads. Boston, Palm Beach, Van Nuys, and a handful of others fight for the next slots. The rankings refresh on the fifth of each month with prior-month data.

Where the data comes from

Most modern aircraft broadcast their position once a second through a small radio called an ADS-B transponder. Volunteer hobbyists around the world run small antennas that pick up those broadcasts and feed them into open databases. AceJet downloads a copy of the daily archive, picks out the aircraft we recognize, and counts where each flight started and ended.

No paid feed, no flight-tracking company involved. The source is public and the license permits commercial reuse with attribution.

What gets counted

• US airports only.
• Private and charter aviation: light jets, midsize jets, super-mids, heavies, ultra-long-range jets, turboprops, and helicopters.
• Arrivals at the airport. We do not also count departures, because most flights start and end at airports in the ranking and we would be double-counting.

What does not get counted

• Scheduled airline flights. Delta, United, JetBlue, and Southwest are excluded. This is a private-aviation ranking.
• Military flights, which mostly do not broadcast on the public bands.
• A small number of aircraft owners who have opted into a federal program that hides their tail number from public feeds.

The "vs. prior month" column

An airport that was sixth last month and third this month shows ▲3. New entries to the top 50 are labeled new. The early months in the dataset have no prior month to compare against, so the change column stays empty.

Things to know

• Alaska shows up high. Anchorage and Kenai consistently land in the top 10. Most of that is small turboprop traffic, not the kind of business-jet activity readers might picture. The numbers are real; the category label is just wider in Alaska than in the Lower 48.
• Coverage has small gaps. Receivers go down occasionally, especially around holiday weeks. We flag any day that returned no data.
• Hidden tails. A few aircraft owners have a federal privacy registration that masks their tail number. Those flights don't show up in any public dataset and aren't in our counts.

Why the monthly URLs never change

When we publish a month's ranking, the page at that URL stays put forever. March 2025's numbers will live at the same address a decade from now. That way, if a newsroom cites our ranking, the citation stays good. If we ever discover a data error, we add a dated note to the page instead of rewriting it.

Take-down requests

Airports are public infrastructure and these counts are aggregate, so we don't take requests at the airport level. Tail-number-level requests, where an individual aircraft owner wants their N-number removed from event-tracker pages, are handled case by case.