One Number Is Never the Point
A single readiness figure is only worth anything if you can take it apart. FlyNook scores six factors independently — weather, aircraft readiness, terrain, airports, NOTAM hazards, and weight and balance — and then combines them with weights that are published rather than hidden, with accident history beside them as context and your own profile and minimums checked as findings. The composite is advisory. It is not a clearance, a dispatch release, or a substitute for the pilot in command's own judgment, and it is deliberately built so that you can disagree with it for a reason you can name.
Where Each Input Comes From
Aviation weather is pulled from NOAA's Aviation Weather Center at the moment you press analyze, not held on a schedule and served stale. Airport, runway and terrain figures come from our own index. Accident history comes from an ingested NTSB corpus covering roughly two decades, searched along the corridor around your route rather than only at the two ends of it. NOTAM coverage depends on configuration: where a live FAA feed is not available, the interface says so instead of quietly filling the gap.
What Happens When Data Is Missing
Missing data is the failure mode that matters. A factor that cannot be scored is marked unavailable rather than defaulted to zero, its weight is redistributed proportionally across the factors that did return, and the briefing's data-completeness figure drops by an amount specific to what went missing. Weather costs the most completeness; traffic costs the least. That is the whole point: a score built on half the inputs should not look like a score built on all of them.
The Decision Is Still Yours
Nothing in the engine produces a verdict. It produces factors, weights, sources and a data-completeness figure, and it points at the things worth verifying against official sources before you fly. Whether the flight happens is a judgment the pilot in command makes, with an instructor where one is involved, and FlyNook's job is to make sure that judgment is made against the whole picture rather than the part that happened to be easiest to look up.
