The Threat Index.

What "normal" looks like — county by county

Each county learns its own baseline. An aircraft at 800 ft over Kern is anomalous because Kern's normal is high-altitude transit — even if the same altitude would be unremarkable over the LA basin.

Baselines refresh on every page load from the last 48 hours of detections. Same math for every county.

The Watchtower Threat Index (WTI) ranks flight events by statistical abnormality and regulatory risk — not intent.

WTI is a signal for journalists, attorneys, and regulators. A high score means a detection deviates sharply from the 48-hour baseline and/or implicates a public regulation. It is not, and never will be, an accusation against any individual.

Component glossary — plain language

Tier meaning

Why convergence matters

Convergence captures the pattern that two or more aircraft in the same airspace band, at the same time, on coordinated tracks, is not coincidence — it is operational coordination. The metric weighs four factors:

• Multi-aircraft spatial proximity within a defined radius.
• Synchronized timing windows (entries and exits inside a few minutes).
• Shared altitude bands suggesting deconfliction between operators.
• Track clustering — parallel or orbital patterns over the same ground point.

Many top-ranked events share the exact same WTI (for example, multiple rows at 91.12). This is expected: when aircraft share the same altitude deviation, timing band, and repeat pattern, the weighted sum collapses to the same value. Identical scores are a feature of the method, not a bug — they make repeat behavior visible at a glance.