About The Frequent Flier

A briefing runs when there is something to say that the filings or the schedule data support and that nobody else has framed properly. That is usually a few times a week rather than daily. There is no quota, because a quota is how a publication ends up rewriting other people's stories: if the week produces nothing worth 1,200 words, nothing goes up.

Subjects cluster in four places. Network moves — a carrier adding or dropping a route, and what the T-100 record says about whether the last attempt worked. Fleet — orders, deliveries, retirements, and the age of what is actually flying. Loyalty — program changes priced against what they replaced, not against the press release. And the regulatory and operational layer: FAA staffing, slot rules, merger reviews, the things that decide whether a schedule survives contact with a Tuesday.

Every piece is dated, bylined, and pinned to the data available when it published. Where a briefing makes a call about what happens next, it says so in those terms rather than dressing a forecast up as a fact.

Everything here — the reporting, the analysis, the data pipeline, and the site itself — is built and written by Michael Chen, a oneworld loyalist based at SFO with more than 1.2 million miles flown. There is no freelance pool and no contributor network; one byline covers the whole site, which is both the constraint and the point.

Nothing on this site is machine-written. Analysis, judgment, and every sentence of every briefing are human work. Software does the jobs software is good at — ingesting the monthly DOT filings, reconciling registrations against the FAA registry, drawing the maps and charts — and stops there.

The Flight Deck is built on primary public filings, not scraped aggregators. Traffic, capacity, and load factors come from the US DOT Bureau of Transportation Statistics T-100 Segment data; fleet inventories from Form 41 Schedule B-43; registration and airworthiness status from the FAA Aircraft Registry; delivery records from Airbus and Boeing; and live operational status from the FAA's National Airspace System feed.

Those sources are federal records, which makes them authoritative and also makes them lagging, uneven, and full of edge cases — regional carriers flying under a mainline brand, codeshares, airports whose annual totals swing on one seasonal operator. The work that turns them into a page is the reconciliation: rolling operating carriers up to the brand that sold the seat, holding the reporting window steady across sections, and refusing to publish a derived figure the underlying filing cannot support.

Every data page carries a source line naming the filing, the window it covers, and when it was last refreshed. The sourcing and correction rules are set out in full in the editorial policy.

The site is supported by display advertising and nothing else. It runs no affiliate links, takes no commissions on bookings or card applications, and publishes no sponsored posts, guest posts, or paid link placements. Coverage is not for sale, and no advertiser sees a piece before it runs.

That matters more than usual in this subject: most of the points-and-miles internet is paid by credit-card referral, which is why so much of it reads like it is. The full terms are on the advertising disclosure page.

Accuracy matters more than being first. If a figure, date, or aircraft assignment here is wrong, it gets checked against the filing it came from and corrected on the page. Send it, along with tips, methodology questions, and press enquiries, via the contact page — one address, read by the person who writes the briefings.