The State of FAA Obstruction Filings

This is the finding we expected to be smaller than it is. Across 212,098 determined cases since January 2025, the average case closes in 62.9 days. But the average hides a spread that matters enormously if you are the one waiting.

A wind turbine takes a median of 125 days to a determination. A rig takes 24. Cranes, which are the most schedule-sensitive filings anyone makes, sit near the fast end.

If you are planning a wind project, the practical consequence is that airspace review is a two-to-four month line item, not a formality you handle during permitting. Treating it like a crane filing is how schedules slip.

Wind turbine notices peaked at 11,506 in 2018, fell to 5,018 by 2021, and reached 21,164 in 2025. That is a 4.2× recovery from the trough, and it makes wind the single most volatile category in the entire obstruction docket.

Read alongside the previous chart, this is the squeeze the wind industry is currently in. It is filing at record volume in the category the FAA takes longest to clear.

The mental image of obstruction evaluation is a tall building near a runway. The data says otherwise. Power lines, cranes and construction equipment together account for far more filings than buildings do, and buildings rank seventh.

This matters for anyone selling into the space, or staffing for it. The typical 7460 filer is a utility, a crane dispatcher or a tower contractor, not an architect.

Since January 2025 the FAA has issued 216,895 determinations on off-airport Part 77 cases. 8 of them were a determination of hazard. Not 8 percent of them. 8 cases in total.

This is the single most misunderstood thing about the process. People plan around the fear of a hazard determination, and that is not the outcome that actually stops projects. The outcome that stops projects is “To Proponent”: 51,286 cases, 23.6% of all determinations, where the FAA hands the case back with something the filer has to resolve. Meanwhile 71.8% come back clean.

The practical reading: the risk in a 7460 filing is rarely a flat refusal. It is delay, conditions, and rework — which is exactly the risk a screening before you file is meant to retire.

121,404 filings since January 2025 were submitted by a representative acting for someone else. 5,076 distinct organisations do that work, but the top ten carry 32.7% of it.

Capitol Airspace Group alone filed 14,411 cases for 489 different clients — 2.8 times as many as the next firm. Several names on this list are not consultancies at all but tower owners and utilities filing for their own affiliates, which is worth remembering before reading the table as a market-share ranking.

Texas files more Part 77 notices than any other state by a wide margin, driven by wind, oil and gas rigs, and transmission. Florida is second, on a very different mix of power lines and cranes.

By airport, CHICAGO O'HARE INTL is in a category of its own with 5,442 filings naming it as the nearest airport, more than three times MIAMI INTL. Note this counts the nearest airport recorded on the notice, so a dense metro with one dominant field will concentrate here.

A no-hazard determination is not permanent. If the structure is not built, the determination lapses and the project has to go back through the process. Counting only No Hazard determinations on organisation-sponsored cases with no recorded build date, 74,565 expire in the twelve months from October 2026 to September 2027, 37,503 of them by the end of March 2027. “To Proponent” cases also carry an expiration date in the archive, but they are not a determination of no hazard, so they are not counted (correction).

The peak is June 2027, with 8,487 expiring across 720 organisations. Nobody sends these reminders. The expiration date sits in a public record that almost no filer is watching.

Source. The FAA's Obstruction Evaluation / Airport Airspace Analysis public archive, downloaded per region and year as the agency publishes it. This edition covers 746 archive files and 2,298,277 case records, of which 1,815,083 are off-airport Part 77 notices and 483,194 are on-airport notices. Data as of September 12, 2026.

Scope. Every chart on this page uses off-airport Part 77 notices only. The on-airport archive has a different schema with no determination or height columns, so mixing the two would quietly change what "a filing" means partway through a chart.

Privacy. Aggregate counts include every case. Any table that names a party includes organisations only — cases the pipeline identified as filed by a private individual are excluded from those tables entirely.

Turnaround. Measured as the days between the entered date and the completion date on determined cases, for structure types with at least 500 determinations. Reported as a median, with the mean in the downloadable table. Cases still in review are excluded, which means a category with a long tail of unresolved cases will look slightly faster here than it feels.

Known limits. 2026 is a partial year and is drawn in grey wherever it appears. Structure categories are derived from the FAA's free-text structure type field by a classifier, so category boundaries are ours, not the FAA's. Airport counts use the nearest-airport field recorded on the notice, which is not the same as "filings affecting that airport's airspace". And these arenotices: a filing is a proposal, not a built structure.

Corrections. If a figure here contradicts something you know from inside this industry, we want to hear it. Email support@idea-engine.studio and we will check the query and publish a correction.