Editorial policy: how we source and correct reporting

The Frequent Flier is built on primary, public data rather than secondhand reporting. Fleet and operator data comes from the US DOT Form 41 Schedule B-43 filing; registration status from the FAA Aircraft Registry; delivery dates from Airbus and Boeing official reports; and live operational status from the FAA's National Airspace System status feed. Where a figure is derived or approximate, the piece says so.

The fleet and delivery datasets are refreshed on a monthly cadence from the latest regulatory filings; every data page carries the date it was last refreshed and the filing year it reflects. The FAA delays dashboard is live. Briefings are analysis pinned to the data available at publication and are dated accordingly.

The Frequent Flier is supported by display advertising and uses no affiliate links. Advertising is served programmatically and has no influence on coverage — advertisers don't determine what gets covered or how it is assessed. How the site is funded is set out on the advertising disclosure page. Analysis follows the data; nothing buys favorable coverage.

Accuracy matters more than being first. If something here is wrong — a stat, a date, an aircraft assignment — flag it and it gets fixed. Cross-source discrepancies surfaced during data ingestion are queued for manual review before they reach a page. A correction is made on the page itself, with the change noted, rather than quietly overwritten. To report an error, use the contact page or email hello@thefrequentflier.com.

A briefing starts from a primary document — a DOT filing, a schedule change, an airline's own investor material or a regulatory docket — not from another outlet's story. Where reporting elsewhere is the trigger, the underlying document is retrieved and read before anything is written, and the other outlet is linked rather than paraphrased.

Every number that appears in a briefing is traced back to the filing it came from, and the window it covers is stated. Figures that are derived — a share, a per-seat cost, a year-over-year change — are computed from the published series rather than quoted secondhand, and the piece says when a figure is an estimate. If a claim cannot be supported by a source a reader could check, it does not run.

Analysis is labelled as analysis. Briefings routinely make a judgment about what a move means or what follows from it; those are arguments, presented as arguments, and separable from the record they are built on.

No briefing on this site is generated, drafted, or rewritten by a language model. Every sentence published under a byline is written by the person whose name is on it.

Software is used where software belongs: ingesting the monthly DOT releases, reconciling tail numbers against the FAA registry, flagging cross-source discrepancies for a human to adjudicate, and rendering the maps and charts. Those are deterministic data pipelines, and the pages built from them are labelled with their source and refresh date so a reader can tell generated tables from written argument.

The Frequent Flier holds no position in any airline, manufacturer, or travel company it covers, and accepts no payment, free travel, upgrades, lounge access, or hospitality from the companies it writes about. Trips referenced in briefings are paid for personally, with cash or with points earned personally.

The author holds elite status and co-branded credit cards with carriers that appear in coverage — unavoidable for anyone who flies enough to write this, and disclosed here rather than pretended away. It buys no favourable treatment: the loyalty programs covered most closely are the ones flown most, and they are also the ones criticised most specifically.

No guest posts, sponsored articles, or paid links are accepted, at any price. Advertising is served programmatically through third parties who have no visibility into editorial and no ability to request, review, or veto a piece.

Photography is either original, licensed, or used under terms that permit publication, and is credited where the licence requires it. The maps, airfield diagrams, and charts are drawn in-house from the underlying public datasets rather than lifted from another site.

The federal datasets behind the Flight Deck are US government public-domain records and remain freely available at their source, which is named on every page that uses them. The presentation, reconciliation, and derived figures are this publication's own work; quoting a figure with a link back is welcome, and wholesale republication of the tables is not.

Every briefing is written by a real person with a real byline — Michael Chen, who reports from more than 1.2 million miles of firsthand travel. Analysis and judgment here are human, not machine-generated.