FlightAware drops its Kalshi suit hours after winning a hearing

What happened

FlightAware LLC discontinued its case against Kalshi on 11 August 2026, the day after filing it, and hours after a federal judge had granted the emergency hearing it asked for. The docket in 1:26-cv-06824 in the Southern District of New York shows the whole sequence inside one day. The case was assigned to Judge Arun Subramanian, summonses were issued to the four defendants, and at entry 14 the judge signed an order to show cause requiring them to appear on 13 August 2026 at 12:00 p.m. in Courtroom 15A at 500 Pearl Street and show 'why an order should not be issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65 temporarily restraining' them from 'using Plaintiff's data in connection with any betting, wagering, gambling, prediction market, event contract, or similar platform or product' and from 'using the FlightAware mark' in the same connection. Opposition papers were due by electronic filing on 12 August and any reply by 9:00 a.m. on the 13th. Entry 15, filed the same day, is a notice under Rule 41(a)(1)(A)(i) stating that the action 'is voluntarily dismissed, without prejudice, against all Defendants'. It is signed by William A. Maher of Wollmuth Maher and Deutsch and names four lawyers at Bartlit Beck with pro hac vice applications forthcoming. That rule lets a plaintiff end a case without a court's permission before the defendant answers, and no answer or appearance for any Kalshi entity is on the docket. Neither party has given a reason. The Block, which is the only outlet found carrying the discontinuance, reports that Kalshi has changed the wording on its flight cancellation market pages, from outcomes 'verified from FlightAware' to 'verified from Primary Source Agency', with an added line that the products 'have not been endorsed by the Primary Source Agency or its affiliates', and quotes a corporate lawyer, Ariel Givner of Givner Law, saying that 'When a plaintiff drops a case this fast after demanding a TRO, it usually means the parties worked something out privately.' The Block says it approached both companies.

Why it matters

The display and the contract are separate documents and only one of them has changed. Kalshi's self-certification for this series, filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on 14 July 2026 under regulation 40.2(a) and still published at the exchange's own address, puts the settlement source inside the binding terms and conditions rather than in the market copy: 'The primary Source Agency is FlightAware', with the United States Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics on-time reporting data named as the secondary source agency, 'applied only if the primary is unavailable or does not publish a usable figure'. The same appendix adds that 'A new Source Agency can be added via a Part 40 amendment'. So an exchange can reword a page in an afternoon and cannot change what settles a contract without filing. Read on 12 August 2026, the exchange's public trade interface still returned FlightAware by name, with a link to flightaware.com, as the sole settlement source for its JFK flight cancellation series, timestamped to the day of the certification, and still pointed at that certification as the contract document; the reworded market page itself could not be read here. What the withdrawal therefore does not do is settle what the suit raised, which is what a settlement source is worth and whether the vendor supplying it can charge for the role. The economics of that question sit in the certification, not in the pleadings. The named alternative is a federal statistical series that is free and published on a lag, so the value of the primary source to this contract is the value of same-day classification, and the gap between the two is the whole of any pricing power a vendor has over a market that settles this way. Every venue that resolves against a private index or a proprietary feed faces the same arithmetic, and the fastest resolution of it available yesterday was a lawsuit that lasted a day.

What is not settled

A dismissal without prejudice ends nothing. FlightAware can refile the same six counts, and the notice gives no reason, records no settlement and contains no covenant; nothing on the docket sets out terms. Whether money changed hands, whether Kalshi agreed to stop using the registered mark, and whether the rewording of the market pages was part of a bargain are all unknown, and the only account of a private resolution is one lawyer's inference in the single report. That rewording could not be verified here, because kalshi.com returns a rate limit page to this runner; what could be read, the exchange's own interface and its certification, still name FlightAware. If the source agency has in fact moved to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, a Part 40 amendment should follow, and none was found. The emergency papers include two declarations and twenty-seven exhibits, of which only three documents in the case are available without payment, so the arguments the plaintiff put to the judge have not been read. The wider question the order to show cause was going to test, whether a licence accepted through a sign-up screen binds a corporate defendant that later relies on the data commercially, is unanswered, and nothing from the Commission addresses whether a named source agency must consent to the role. No outlet outside one crypto trade publication was found carrying either the filing or the discontinuance.