When the online tracking of their jets tires leaders and billionaires


Alexander Boero

August 09, 2022 at 5:10 p.m.

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Elon Musk © Naresh777 / Shutterstock.com

Elon Musk is among the personalities whose air travel tracking is the most important © Naresh777 / Shutterstock

The trips by private jet of certain personalities, at sometimes ridiculous distances, are followed and denounced by a group of Internet users, who increasingly annoy the people concerned.

Leaders, politicians and stars: all are increasingly irritated by the “hunting” they suffer from a community that scrutinizes and reveals to the general public their trips by private jet, and this, throughout the world. ‘year. If this practice, which tends to spread, can prove to be a breach of respect for privacy, it is however not illegal and can help raise awareness.

A perfectly legal operation, which has become useful even for airlines and manufacturers

More and more sites or Twitter and Instagram accounts follow, in real time, the air traffic, more particularly that of the private jets which belong to certain leaders or prominent personalities, spied on according to their movements. Some try to stop the practice, but nothing works.

We haven’t deleted anything so far. This is public information “, explains the founder of ADS-B Exchange, an American site for tracking your traffic. He refuses to be the arbiter who ” decide who is right or wrong “. And rightly so: if there are rules, the communities, groups and individuals who gather the data are content only to reconstruct flight paths from data that is legally available and accessible.

Private jet © Ahmed Muntasir / Pexels

© Ahmed Muntasir / Pexels

US regulations help, it must be said, because the law requires that all aircraft in certain areas carry the ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast) satellite system. The system helps the aircraft determine its position via GPS and broadcasts its position and other information to ground stations as well as other ADS-B equipped aircraft. The United States has required since 1er January 2020 that all aircraft flying above their territory be equipped with this system.

To summarize simply, the latter periodically sends the position of the device to the air traffic controllers, all by radio. This is what allowed the birth of the Swedish site Flightradar24 in 2007. It monitors more than 180,000 daily flights thanks to its 34,000 receivers located throughout the world. As early as 2009, it opened up its network and allowed anyone with an ADS-B receiver to upload data to the network. Since then, it has been used by more than 2 million people daily, including the largest airlines and aircraft manufacturers such as Airbus, Boeing or Embraer. We can almost speak of an institution for tracking and referencing flights.

On social networks, Internet users do not miss the leaders who abuse very short flights

Identifying flights, schedules and other information is one thing, but knowing the identity of the owner of an aircraft is an even more complicated mission. Jack Sweeney maintains the Twitter account Celebrity Jets, created last October and which has more than 110,000 subscribers. This one follows the activity of Elon Musk, but not only. This Monday morning, for example, he relayed the very short Californian flight (only 37 minutes, 3 tonnes of CO2 and an estimated $2,015 in fuel) of famed boxer Floyd Mayweather, theft that could be covered in less than 5 hours by car. But there is worse, hang in there.

Jack Sweeney, just 19, managed to find Elon Musk’s private jet after making a simple request for information from the public records of the United States government. He actually created a devoted Twitter account, ElonJet, which he also administers. In return, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX offered him $5,000 to delete the account which has nearly 500,000 subscribers.

If we are obviously not here to throw stones, we understand the interest of these accounts, which alert in their own way to the appalling carbon footprint of single individuals, like this 17-minute private jet flight made by Kylie Jenner last month in California, angering many netizens. The latest recent case is credited to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, who traveled to Taiwan and whose flight was watched by more than 700,000 people on the site. Flightradar24which we discussed above.

Note that in France, we are not outdone on the subject. On Instagram, you may have recently heard of Bernard’s plane (in tribute to the boss of LVMH, Bernard Arnault), which is rampant on Instagram. Recently, he also monitors the two private jets of the company TotalEnergies. One of them has moreover recently shone by carrying out, on July 27 and 28, a Paris-Bordeaux round trip (a route covered in just over two hours by TGV), to win only an hour by plane and consume more than 3 tons of CO2 by the way, according to estimates.

The practice, which disturbs, pushes certain governments to act, in particular on the other side of the globe. In China, the government seized several hundred receivers used by flight tracking sites last year, citing a risk of espionage.

Sources: West FranceInstagram @laviondebernardTwitter @ElonJet and @CelebJets, Flightradar24





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