How our celebrity jet tracker works.

Live positions come from adsb.lol, a free network of volunteer ground receivers. Its data is open and shared under the ODbL license. When adsb.lol is busy or down, we switch to ADSB.fi, a second volunteer network. Both pick up the ADS-B signal that planes broadcast in the clear.

Both feeds are public. Nothing here is decoded from a leaked source or scraped from somewhere it shouldn’t be.

When a plane is over land, a new position arrives every few seconds. Over open ocean, long gaps are normal. There are no ground receivers out there to hear the plane.

To keep the marker moving during a gap, we use dead reckoning. We push the last known position forward along its great-circle path at its last known speed and heading. When the next real position comes in, we fill the gap with a straight line between the two real points. The trail then snaps back to what actually happened.

Every projection follows the curve of the earth. A flight from California to Asia bends north over the Aleutian Islands, just like real flights do. It is not drawn as a straight line on a flat map.

Most flights are routine and simply stay on the map. Some landings clear our bar for a story: an A-list name, a very short hop, an unusual destination, or a jet moving in the middle of a live news story. For those, the desk writes a short, reported piece. It says what moved, where it went, and the public reason the trip lines up with that week.

The stories are about aircraft movements, not people. We track a registration, so we write “if aboard” instead of claiming who was in the cabin. Routine flights get no story at all. We would rather publish fewer pieces and make each one worth reading.

We only show what ADS-B already broadcasts in public. We don’t use private flight plans or leaked passenger lists, and nobody comes knocking on anyone’s door.

Every link between a tail number and an owner on this site comes from public sources. These include the FAA Releasable Aircraft Database, SEC EDGAR filings (10-Ks, DEF 14A proxy statements and 8-Ks), planespotters.net captions and news reports. We have no insider information, and we don’t claim certainty. We publish what the public record supports, and we re-check it every week.

An attribution can be wrong for three main reasons:

1. Trustee LLCs.Many business jets are registered to privacy trustees, such as TVPX Aircraft Solutions, Bank of Utah, Wilmington Trust, A7P Trust and CSC Delaware Trust. The registered owner is a shell company. Linking it to the real owner often depends on news reports we’ve cross-checked. We never rely on a private filing.
2. FAA privacy programs.The FAA’s LADD (Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed) and PIA (Privacy ICAO Address) programs hide or rotate the registered owner field. About 10–15% of the planes we track use one of these programs.
3. Re-registrations and sales. Tail numbers move, registrations transfer and planes get sold. The copy of the FAA registry we read updates daily, so a brand-new transfer can take up to a day to show up.

We run a five-tier verification audit on every entry. The current roster is published live as a markdown report with the evidence for each entry: FAA owner, status, model and hex; SEC top-filer hits; the ADS-B Exchange owner string; and the cited briefing text. At the most recent run, 146 of 198 U.S.-registered tails had CONFIRMED status. The rest are either held through trustees with indirect evidence, or hidden by LADD.

Found a mistake? Email info@celebplanes.com with the tail number, the celebrity in question and any source you have, such as a news article, an FAA registry link or a planespotters URL. We re-check within 24 hours. Then we fix the entry, remove it from the roster, or explain in the briefing why we still stand by it. Past corrections stay in the audit report’s history section, so the chain of evidence stays public.

Important. This site only observes. We plot public ADS-B broadcasts and public registry data so readers can think about the climate, fairness and accountability questions that private flying raises. We do not endorse using this data to harass, dox, target or otherwise harm anyone. Doing so may break state and federal law, including 18 U.S.C. §§ 2261A and 2265. If you suspect misuse, please contact us.

Each flight’s CO₂ is the jet’s fuel burn in gallons per hour (from the maker’s specs) × flight time × about 9.6 kg (21 lb) of CO₂ per gallon of Jet-A. Lifetime totals add up every finished flight in our database. The tree-year and homes-per-year comparisons use EPA conversion factors.

Read these numbers as rough estimates. Real fuel burn changes with load, weather, altitude and route. We aim for the right order of magnitude, not auditor-grade accounting.

It comes down to an information gap. Ordinary people fly commercial, and their travel shows up on public maps. Airlines list flight numbers. Ground stations pick up Mode-S transponders. Any kid with $20 of hardware and a Raspberry Pi can plot the result.

Wealthy owners can step out of that system. FAA programs (PIA, BARR / LADD), ICAO privacy markings and the FR24 “private” filter exist mainly so a billionaire can pay to make public flight data disappear from public view. The data itself is the same kind of broadcast a Southwest 737 sends out over Kansas.

We don’t think you should be able to buyyour way out of public data while everyone else’s stays in the open. The rules that apply to a regional jet landing at LAX should apply to a Gulfstream. That’s the only reason this site exists.

Servers and API calls cost money. The site is free to read, and advertising and reader support pay for it. If you want to help directly:

• a.Buy a coffee at buymeacoffee.com/celebplanes.
• b.Subscribe to the printed broadsheet. It’s a real monthly newspaper of the month’s flights, mailed to you on paper. /subscribe.

The data on the site stays free, forever.