How we track operator activity

What you're looking at

Every charter operator we list runs a fleet of aircraft, each with a unique identifier broadcast in real time by the transponder. We count those broadcasts to build a picture of how active each fleet has been over the past month: how many flights, how many hours, which routes, and which types of aircraft did the work.

Where the data comes from

Volunteer hobbyists around the world run small antennas that pick up the position broadcasts from aircraft overhead and feed them into open databases. We pull a copy each day, match each broadcast against a known fleet roster, and tally the activity.

"Fleet utilization"

Three numbers tell the story:

• Flights observed. Total trips by aircraft in this operator's fleet over the past 30 days.
• Hours flown. The time those flights spent in the air, added up.
• Fleet active. The share of the operator's aircraft that flew at least once in the window. An aircraft sitting in maintenance for the month counts as inactive.

These are floors, not ceilings. They miss flights that flew below the altitude where ADS-B coverage is reliable and a small number of aircraft on a federal program that masks their tail number from public feeds.

Routes and origins

Top routes are the city pairs that show up most often in the operator's recent flying. Busiest origins are the airports their aircraft most often depart from. Operators with multiple crew bases will show multiple busy origins, which is usually how their structure works.

Type mix

We know each aircraft's make and model from the FAA registry. The type-mix table shows how the operator's flights split across those models. Operators with a mixed fleet (a few King Airs, a Citation, a Falcon) get a clean breakdown of which aircraft is doing the heavy lifting.

How current the numbers are

Daily archives publish about one to three days behind the date. Operator pages refresh weekly. Any given page reflects activity over a 30-day window that ended three to ten days before you loaded the page.

Edge cases worth knowing

• Fractional fleets. NetJets, Flexjet, and similar fractional operators pool aircraft across thousands of cardholders. High flights-per-aircraft means the program is heavily used, not necessarily that any single cardholder is flying more.
• Brand-new tail numbers. A newly delivered aircraft takes a month or two to show up in our roster. New arrivals to a fleet may appear inactive even when they're flying daily.
• Hidden tails. Operators whose aircraft are on the federal privacy registry will show artificially low flight counts. If the gap between fleet size and observed activity is large, this is usually the reason.

Found something wrong?

If you operate one of these fleets and the numbers look off, email [email protected] with your current tail roster and aircraft types. We'll rerun the math against the corrected roster and update the page on the next refresh.