There are points of attraction on the radar – Hi-Tech – Kommersant

Flightradar, FlightAware, FlightStats and dozens of other sites and mobile applications today allow you to find out where a particular aircraft is in just a couple of clicks. And if earlier the traffic of such sites was rather low, then recently there are more and more people who track the movements of politicians, businessmen and show business stars.

The story of the flight of the speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan last week became the main topic of the world media. Hundreds of publications and TV channels followed the outcome of the visit of the American official to the island.

However, millions of people chose to watch Nancy Pelosi’s flight not on TV, but with the help of the Flighradar24 flight tracking service. The landing of the aircraft with the call sign SPAR19 was simultaneously followed by 708 thousand people. And at least some part of the flight using this service was tracked by 2.9 million people. These are record numbers for both Flightradar24 and other similar sites.

The surge of user interest in Flightradar24 was unexpected even for the site’s managers (its servers were not ready for such loads), but by no means accidental. People’s love for flight tracking services is already a pattern.

Usually the traffic of such sites is quite low. Up to 200 people can watch an ordinary flight, rarely more. However, if one of the celebrities or politicians is flying on board the liner, these numbers soar to tens or even hundreds of thousands.

As the representatives of the site themselves explain, people are attracted by the opportunity to follow the event and live the story together with its participants. “You can participate in some kind of story in real time,” explains Ian Pechenik, head of communications at Flightradar24, explains the popularity of the service. “If a newspaper is the first draft of a story, then these are preliminary recordings.”

For example, in November 2017, 22,000 people watched Priti Patel’s plane return from Kenya to Britain. Ms. Patel was then British Secretary of State for International Development and was touring Africa. But her trip was abruptly cut short by a scandal. It turned out that the minister held several meetings with Israeli officials over the summer, about which she did not report. As soon as this was discovered, Priti Patel was ordered to immediately return to Britain. It was then clear to everyone that the minister was flying to London to hear about his dismissal.

Much more people followed in January 2021 the fate of Alexei Navalny, who on January 13 announced his decision to return to Russia from Germany after six months of treatment. On the same day, it became known that he was put on the federal wanted list in Russia in the Yves Rocher case. Despite this, the politician nevertheless flew to Moscow, where he was soon arrested. About 550,000 people followed Mr. Navalny’s flight on the Flightradar24 website.

Flightradar, FlightAware, FlightStats and many other flight tracking websites and mobile apps provide users with real-time information about tens of thousands of flights per day. To do this, they use ADS-B sensors (they receive data from aircraft about their heading, altitude and speed), MLAT technology (based on the assessment of the time difference of aircraft signals), as well as data from satellites, airlines and airports.

Flightradar, in addition to the above, also uses information from the US Civil Aviation Administration (FAA). However, signing an agreement with the FAA entails an obligation not to disclose data on certain flights. Usually this is data on military and private aircraft, whose owners turn to the FAA with a request to classify information about the movement of ships. Services that are not affiliated with government organizations rely only on sensor data, but are free to track any flights.

In recent years, services for tracking air travel have also become actively used by the media.

Once, thanks to the data of the ADS-B Exchange website, journalists managed to track the movements of one of Muammar Gaddafi’s assistants. Later, representatives of the service had to respond to a complaint from his lawyers. “This guy used to work for Gaddafi. He was accused of war crimes, killing people and the like. My guess is that someone used our data to find out that he was transporting gold from Venezuela to Libya in his private jet, and was not too happy that it was revealed, ”Dan Streufert of ADS-B Exchange tells The Guardian .

And journalists from the British publication Yard, based on data from the same ADS-B Exchange, found out which celebrity pollutes the environment the most. That “someone” turned out to be singer Taylor Swift. In the first half of 2022, her private jet has flown 170 times, with an average flight time of just 86 minutes. However, the representative of the singer declaredthat her aircraft is often rented out, and “attributing to her most or all of the flights made on the plane is fundamentally wrong.”

Users’ love of watching celebrity planes can take unexpected forms. As in the case of 19-year-old American student Jack Sweeney, who created more than a dozen Twitter bots that publish data on every movement of private jets of wealthy people like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk. The latter is very active and popular on Twitter, and the bot tracking the businessman’s Gulfstream G650 flights also quickly gained popularity. Elon Musk offered the student $3,000 last fall to delete his account, but he did not agree, saying that he would be satisfied with $50,000 or an internship at Tesla. The bot has not yet been removed, and the number of its subscribers is already approaching 500,000. At the beginning of this year, there were about 120,000 of them.

Kirill Sarkhanyants