How American billionaires are trying to hide flights on their planes from “crazy people”

Musk has gone even further in his commitment to privacy. He signed up for a free FAA program called PIA (Privacy ICAO Aircraft Address), which allows private jet owners to hide their location by changing their broadcast identification code.

The plan failed. Sweeney still publishes the movements of the G650 Mask in real time, simply by going to BlueSky, Instagram and Facebook (the last two social networks belong to Meta, which is recognized as extremist in Russia (*aggressor country) and is banned). The developer himself tells Forbes that breaking the FAA’s privacy code was not difficult: “It can be done in one day.” Eventually, according to Sweeney, Musk and his team stopped trying, and Musk now flies without camouflage. The billionaire did not respond to Forbes’ request for comment.

According to JetSpy service, which uses a subscription model to help track air traffic, the FAA’s PIA program covers the movements of 48 private aircraft this year. The Delaware-based company was able to identify the owners of 38 aircraft from this list and exclusively shared its findings with Forbes. The list includes big names from the gossip columns and owners of technology and financial empires, with some striking exceptions (see table below).

Even though the owners of the planes are registered with PIA, Taylor Swift can still be seen frequently visiting her 6-foot boyfriend Travis Kelce in Kansas City, where Magic Johnson has rushed for a new deal on a personal Gulfstream III, how many times did Kenneth Griffin visit France or where did Jeff Bezos take off and land? Sergey Brin and Evan Spiegel—or at least their planes.

Anyone can also follow the routes of corporate planes plying the skies over the United States of the largest retailer Walmart and the WinCo Foods supermarket chain, or the University of Kansas, which has long been punished by its own teaching staff for the too expensive maintenance of its own Cessna Citation CJ4 airliner.

Transponder signals

Those who like to spy on other people’s flights are monitoring signals from transponders that planes are required to transmit from 2020. These devices send data about location, altitude, speed and a unique identification code assigned by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

The system is called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, or ADS-B. When it was designed in the 1990s, the developers did not imagine that hobbyists would track aircraft using inexpensive receivers, exchange data on the Internet and create maps of aircraft movements around the world.

This is how the Federal Aviation Administration’s confidential program was born: it allows planes to send false codes, preventing identification by everyone except the authorities. It costs nothing to become a PIA member, but changing your codes and checking if they work is difficult and expensive.

Experts say the program doesn’t work because it covers too few aircraft (the Federal Aviation Administration says 390 alternate identifiers have been issued since PIA began in 2019) and owners don’t change their fake codes often enough.

“It’s useless,” says Martin Strohmaier, co-founder of the European website OpenSky Network, which tracks air travel using a crowdsourcing model. “And in the worst case, it’s even dangerous, because people may think that the system provides some kind of protection, when in fact it does not.”

Taylor + Travis

Taylor Swift can hardly count on any kind of cover – millions of fans of the pop icon are watching her every move. However, tracking aircraft offers a glimpse into its heart. Her plane has already landed in Kansas City three times in October. Everyone knows that on October 12, Swift was in the crowd of fans at Arrowhead Stadium and watched the football match of her boyfriend, whom she herself made famous. According to JetSpy (as well as Sweeney’s @taylorswiftjets Instagram account), the singer’s private jet took her to her destination that day, flew back to Nashville, and returned to Kansas City on October 14 (there should be a lot of “hands with a heart” emoji here). ).

Others fly to different places for reasons unknown to outsiders. For example, the founder of the hedge fund Citadel, Ken Griffin. Forbes estimates his fortune at $33.5 billion, and one of the entrepreneur’s firms, Citadel Securities, is an intermediary in every third stock exchange transaction in the United States. His Bombardier Global Express aircraft (a used copy costs $12 million) this year, until the twentieth of October, flew 195 flights and covered almost 476,000 km. According to JetSpy, in 2023 the billionaire’s ship visited France more often than Chicago, where Citadel was until recently headquartered (the company moved to Florida last year) and where business remains very active.

And although we have no way to look into Griffin’s heart – he did not respond to Forbes’ request to tell more about his travels – we can assume that he, like Musk, has security reasons why he would like to move outside radar fields of view. Eg, businessman’s location being tracked individual investors on Reddit blaming him for the controversial shutdown of GameStop stock trading on Robinhood in 2021. At the time, this helped major stock market players avoid billions of dollars in losses, but it hurt many homegrown investors. Griffin denies any involvement.

“Many of my clients have had their safety compromised by people following them,” said Dan Drowen, CEO of Solairus Aviation, which manages more than 300 private jets for their owners but does not do business with Griffin. “It’s worst for those who have children.”

Jack Sweeney Musk allowed him to create a new account on social network X tracking the billionaire’s personal planes, on the condition that Sweeney would publish location data only after 24 hours. However, Sweeney still publishes information and is convinced that the PIA codes were cracked correctly. “This account has every right to post the location of aircraft,” he tweeted in 2022, before he was banned. Sweeney states that aircraft location data is public information and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder, even AF1” (referring to Air Force One, the US President’s plane).

Another reason the rich and famous are touchy is that aircraft tracking data is used by environmentalists to measure the damage business jets are causing to the global climate. For example, the average American produces 16 tons of carbon dioxide annually. By comparison, Griffin’s plane emitted about 12 million tons in the first nine-plus months of 2023.

Espionage within the law

Tracking also makes it possible to engage in corporate espionage on a completely legal basis. Brad Pierce, owner of Restaurant Equipment World, headquartered in Florida, told Forbes that by calling shareholders from his Cirrus SR-22, he was able to significantly expand his business. In addition, he says, in the same way, one large competitor, whom he does not want to name, monitors his movements and then himself visits the potential clients whom Pierce has targeted. The entrepreneur claims that he received the information from the leaders of that company themselves, who confessed to him at industry conferences. “They said: “We have one person working in our office who is constantly trying to track where you are, so that we can then send our own representatives there,” the businessman explained.

A business advantage over other players is the main advantage of subscribing to aircraft tracking sites like JetSpy, Quandl and JetTrack.

For the PIA program to work properly, aircraft owners would ideally need to change the fake identifiers before each flight, according to OpenSky Network’s Strohmaier.

Rene Cervantes, vice president of operations at Solairus Aviation, which operates a fleet of private jets and serves PIA member clients, says that’s not currently possible. To change the code, the transponder manufacturer needs to release a special update to the on-board software, and always on a CD – the whole procedure can take a month. According to Cervantes, many owners of business jets, when they learn about this, abandon their plans altogether.

Some program participants seem to have completely given up. Among those who no longer fly with alternative addresses since last year are Kim Kardashian, Mark Zuckerberg and private venture capital giant Blackstone Group, led by billionaire Stephen Schwarzman.

The French tycoon also gave up Bernard Arnault. But he did something smarter: last year, when the CEO of luxury conglomerate LVMH got angry with a Twitter user who shamed him for his high carbon emissions, the billionaire sold the corporate jet.

The entrepreneur, whose fortune Forbes this month estimated at $187.6 billion, calling him the second richest person in the world, is now not the owner of the aircraft, but a lessee.

Translation by Anton Bundin

Lists of famous jet owners – billionaires and celebrities