On the night of March 26, the Dodgers beat Arizona 8-2 in their home opener and a crowd of 53,712 began to leave the stadium. A couple of minutes after the final out, an LAPD helicopter lifted off from the department’s downtown heliport and flew 29 loops around Dodger Stadium over the next 74 minutes.
That flight is one of 8,967 in a year of LAPD helicopter tracks we collected, from August 16, 2025, through August 15, 2026. The department’s helicopters broadcast their positions through ADS-B transponders, and a volunteer network of receivers across the region records the signals. After cleaning, the data holds 20,886,139 positions from 17 registered helicopters, 16 of which were seen flying during the year.
Those flights add up to 12,828 observed aircraft-hours. At the $2,916 per flight hour estimated in the City Controller’s 2023 audit, that’s about $37.4 million worth of flying.
None of this is LAPD’s official flight log. It’s what community antennas happened to receive, so some flights and parts of flights are missing and every total here is a floor. There’s still enough of it to show where the fleet spends its time and how that changes over a day.
Plotted on a blank background, the positions draw Los Angeles on their own. Freeways and regular flight corridors appear as bright lines where tracks repeat, and some neighborhoods fill in almost solid because helicopters cross or circle over them again and again, while others barely register.
Half the time falls on a fifth of the ground
Of the 2,495 census tracts in the analysis, 277 account for half of all observed time overhead. Those tracts are 11.1 percent of the total and cover 19.4 percent of the land. The busiest five percent of tracts get 30.8 percent of the time on 3.4 percent of the ground.
Per square kilometer, Chinatown is the most heavily overflown neighborhood in the city, with about 63 hours of observed helicopter time over the year. Westlake follows at 55, then Pico-Union at 50 and Downtown at 48.
Chinatown gets sixty-two hours of helicopter overhead per square kilometer
Observed hours in the air above each square kilometer, the fourteen most heavily overflown neighborhoods in the year to 15 August 2026.
In raw hours the order shifts, since bigger neighborhoods have more ground to collect time over. Downtown leads with 727 observed hours, ahead of Boyle Heights with 403, Westlake with 388 and Hollywood with 357. Van Nuys logs 273 and Koreatown 251.
Those totals count every airborne minute over a place, so a helicopter crossing a neighborhood on its way somewhere else adds to the count just as one circling there does. Living under a flight path and living under a helicopter that circles your block for an hour are different experiences, and that’s why the data also picks out orbiting.
A stretch of flight counts as an orbit when the helicopter stays within 1.5 kilometers of a central point for at least 90 seconds, turns through at least a full 360 degrees, averages under 80 knots and stays below 2,500 feet above the ground. It doesn’t have to be a neat circle, and wide or lopsided loops qualify as long as they meet those conditions.
Orbiting time is the observed time inside those stretches. It describes how the aircraft moved rather than why, and nothing in the flight data says whether a helicopter was answering a call, searching for someone, backing up officers on the ground or training.
The income gap is large, but density explains most of it
Sorted into fifths by median household income, the poorest fifth of tracts gets a median of 730 minutes of helicopter time per square kilometer and the richest fifth gets 16, a 46-fold difference.
The poorest fifth of the city draws forty-six times the helicopter time of the richest
Median observed minutes overhead per square kilometer, census tracts grouped by median household income.
Much of that gap comes from population density. Lower-income parts of Los Angeles tend to pack more residents, buildings and activity into each square kilometer, so any measure based on land area runs higher in dense neighborhoods even when helicopter time per resident is far less lopsided.
Density tracks helicopter time per square kilometer more closely than income does, with a Spearman correlation of +0.50 against -0.36 for income. Measured per thousand residents instead, income’s correlation falls to -0.19. A gap remains, but it’s much smaller.
Even among tracts of similar density, though, the poorer half still recorded more helicopter time in every group: 1.3 times as much among the least dense tracts, 1.5 times in the middle and 3.4 times among the densest.
Circling and passing through are different patterns
Some districts sit under the routes helicopters take between LAPD’s bases and the rest of the city, while others see far more circling.
In Council District 15, which includes Wilmington and San Pedro, 73 percent of observed helicopter time is orbiting. District 8 and District 9 in South Los Angeles are both at 66 percent.
In the harbor districts most helicopter time is spent circling. Over the hills, most of it is passing through.
Share of each council district's observed time overhead that meets the orbiting test, year to 15 August 2026.
Council District 4, which covers parts of the Hollywood Hills, Sherman Oaks and Studio City, has a much lower orbiting share at 32 percent, and Districts 12 and 13 are each around 36 percent.
Equal hours overhead can mean quite different things from one district to the next. A district along a busy corridor may log plenty of helicopters moving steadily across it, while another logs fewer hours but spends more of them under a helicopter circling a few blocks.
The fleet nearly disappears before dawn
On an average day, at least one LAPD helicopter is in the air for about 19 hours. Activity builds through the morning and holds fairly steady from around 9 a.m. until after midnight. At 1 p.m., an average of 2.11 helicopters are airborne, while at 6 a.m. it’s 0.06.
The fleet flies about nineteen hours a day, then stops for two
Mean number of LAPD helicopters airborne in each hour of the local day, averaged across the year to 15 August 2026.
Nearly all of the quiet comes in a short window before dawn. Between about 5 and 7 a.m. the fleet is almost entirely on the ground, and then activity starts climbing again.
Day of the week matters much less. Tuesday is the busiest and Saturday the quietest, about 20 percent apart.
The whole year is on The Basin’s helicopter map, along with a replay of the tracks building up over time. Tables and methodology are in Basin Data, and the aircraft positions come from community-received ADS-B data provided by Airplanes.live.