How it works.

Three feeds keep the map honest. ADS-B Exchange via RapidAPI gives us real-time positions from the ground-station network — fast, dense over land, free of privacy filters. Flightradar24 Premium picks up satellite ADS-B (Aireon) for oceanic and remote-airspace flights where ground stations can't reach. And FR24 bounds search handles the privacy- filtered N/A registrations using fingerprint matching on aircraft type, position, altitude, speed and heading.

All three feeds are public. Nothing here is decoded from a leaked source or scraped from somewhere it shouldn't be.

Aircraft positions arrive every 5–15 seconds when a plane is over land. Over open ocean, gaps of several minutes are normal — Aireon satellite passes are sparse and ADS-B doesn't reach.

To keep the marker moving smoothly during the gaps, we use dead reckoning: project the last known position forward along its great-circle path at its known speed and heading. When the next real fix lands, we backfill the gap with linear interpolation between the two real points so the trail snaps to truth instead of the projection.

All projections respect the curvature of the earth. A flight from California to Asia bows north over the Aleutians the way actual flights do — not as a straight line on a flat map.

On every active flight, an LLM ensemble looks at: the aircraft type, the celebrity's prior twenty flights, the current position, heading and speed, the time of day at the destination, and the typical range of the airframe. It returns a likely destination, two alternates, a confidence score and a short reasoning paragraph.

Predictions are guesses, not surveillance. The model has no access to private flight plans, no relationship with anyone in the aviation system, and no claim to know what's actually scheduled. If a prediction matches reality, it's because the public pattern was strong. If it misses, it misses.

We only surface what ADS-B already broadcasts publicly. No private flight plans. No leaked manifests. No knock-knock at anyone's door.

For privacy-filtered registrations (N/A on FR24), we use fingerprinting on type and trajectory rather than tail-number leakage. The match has to clear tight gates on aircraft type code, position, altitude, speed and heading before we'll write it as a fix.

Every tail-number → owner attribution on this site is derived from public sources: the FAA Releasable Aircraft Database, ADSB Exchange, SEC EDGAR filings (10-Ks, DEF 14A proxy statements, 8-Ks), planespotters.net captions, and reported news. We do not have insider information. We do not claim certainty. We publish what the public record supports, and we re-audit weekly.

Three structural reasons an attribution may be wrong:

1. Trustee LLCs.A meaningful share of business jets are held under privacy trustees (TVPX Aircraft Solutions, Bank of Utah, Wilmington Trust, A7P Trust, CSC Delaware Trust). The registered owner is a shell whose connection to the actual beneficial owner often relies on news reporting we’ve cross-referenced — never on a private filing.
2. FAA privacy programs.The FAA’s LADD (Limited Aircraft Data Displayed) and PIA (Privacy ICAO Address) programs blank or rotate the registered owner field. Roughly 10–15% of the planes we track sit behind one of these programs.
3. Re-registrations and sales. Tail numbers move, registrations transfer, planes get sold. The FAA registry mirror we read updates daily, so a brand-new transfer can be invisible for up to a day.

We run a five-tier verification audit on every entry. The current roster is published live as a markdown report with per-entry evidence (FAA owner, status, model, hex; SEC top-filer hits; ADSB Exchange owner string; cited briefing prose). As of the most recent run: 146 of 198 US-registered tails have CONFIRMED status; the rest are either trustee-fronted with indirect evidence or LADD-redacted.

Found a mistake? Email [email protected] with the tail number, the celebrity in question, and any source (news article, FAA registry link, planespotters URL, etc.). We re-verify within 24 hours and either correct the entry, retire it from the roster, or note in the briefing why we still believe the attribution holds. Past corrections are kept in the audit report’s history section so the chain of evidence stays transparent.

Important. The site is observational. The information here is plotted from public ADS-B broadcasts and public registry data so readers can think about the climate, equity, and accountability questions raised by private aviation. Using this data to harass, dox, target, or otherwise harm any individual is not endorsed by us and may be a violation of state and federal law (including 18 U.S.C. §§ 2261A and 2265). If you suspect misuse, please contact us.

Per-flight CO₂ is fuel-burn rate (gallons per hour, from manufacturer specs) × flight duration × 21.5 lb CO₂ per gallon of Jet-A. Lifetime totals aggregate every completed flight in our database. Tree-year and homes-per- year equivalences use EPA conversion factors.

Numbers should be read as rough estimates. Real-world burn varies with payload, weather, altitude, route. We're aiming for an order-of-magnitude picture, not auditor-grade accounting.

Information asymmetry. The ordinary person flies commercial and their travel pattern shows up — sometimes literally — on a real-time map: airlines list flight numbers, ground stations paint Mode-S transponders, and any kid with $20 of hardware and a Raspberry Pi can plot the result.

Wealthy operators have the option to step out of that system. FAA programs (PIA, BARR / LADD), ICAO privacy markings, and the FR24 "private" filter all exist primarily so a billionaire can pay to make their public flight data disappear from the public record — while the data itself is exactly the same kind of broadcast a Southwest 737 emits over Kansas.

We don’t think you should be able to buyyour way out of public data while everyone else has theirs in the open. The same transparency that applies to a regional jet on final at LAX should apply to a Gulfstream. That’s the only reason this site exists.

Servers cost money, ADS-B feeds cost money, the model API calls cost money. To keep the lights on we have to charge for something— but we won’t put ads on the site, because the second a sponsor is paying us, “public data should be free” stops being a principle and starts being a sales pitch. So the only two ways to support the work are:

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

That’s the whole business model. The data on the site stays free, forever.