  The spinor-helicity formalism is an essential technique of the amplitudes
community. We draw on this method to construct a scheme for classifying
higher-dimensional spacetimes in the style of the four-dimensional Petrov
classification and the Newman-Penrose formalism. We focus on the
five-dimensional case for concreteness. Our spinorial scheme naturally
reproduces the full structure previously seen in both the CMPP and de Smet
classifications, and resolves longstanding questions concerning the
relationship between the two classifications.
