Private jet tracking gains notoriety, is there a solution?

A screenshot of the Instagram account @elonmusksjet which tracks the billionaire's aircraft movements.

Private jet tracking is not a new phenomenon, but the advent and exponential growth of social media have raised its notoriety, according to David Gitman, president at Monarch Air Group (pictured below).

Pop singer Taylor Swift and businessman Elon Musk have both been the subject of social media accounts—created by a University of Florida undergraduate named Jack Sweeney—dedicated to tracking their aircraft movements globally, with tens of thousands of followers on each account. Both also threatened legal action against Sweeney for his actions.

Arguably, Musk bought Twitter at least partly to remove Sweeney’s account from the platform. Musk initially cited “free speech” as the main motivation behind his acquisition of Twitter and pledged not to ban the account, but a month after the transaction closed, so did ElonJet. The Tesla CEO had also previously offered around $50,000 to the holder of the account to cease activity.

Whilst many will say the impact on Musk, Swift, or any celebrity’s flying habits is negligible, examples of aircraft tracking affecting business are not uncommon. One of the most infamous tracking incidents took place in 2019, according to Gitman, when Occidental Petroleum CEO Vicki Hollub took a company aircraft to Omaha, Nebraska—the home of Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett. The Tuesday after, Berkshire Hathaway announced it would take a $10bn preferred share stake in Occidental, contingent on its acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum succeeding.

“Sure enough, Occidental visit on the Saturday, and by the Sunday people are making stock bets because that is what the stock market does,” Gitman told CJI. “In my opinion, that incident and others like it—think about the movie Wall Street—they’re more important than Elon Musk or Taylor Swift. When I speak to my colleagues in investment banking or financial services, they tell me they do this regularly.”

However, if someone lands at London City Airport, it doesn’t mean they are about to buy Citigroup. It is more often than not an educated guess when tracking an aircraft, made more or less sure depending on certain variables such as airport remoteness—there is a lot more going on in London than Omaha.

Other than chartering or fractional programmes—Buffett only flies NetJets—Gitman said there is “very little” that can be done to prevent the public from tracking aircraft movements. “Once you own an aircraft and people know you own it, then it can be tracked. These days it takes as little as a pilot putting a selfie on Instagram.

“If you want to avoid tracking, if you don’t want people knowing where you’re going, you’ve got to charter an aircraft in my opinion.”

The FAA’s Reauthorisation Bill published in April is giving owners more defence against trackers through a new law which will soon come into effect. The law will enable aircraft owners to apply to censor all identifiable information except “for physical markings required by law” by “attest[ing] to a safety or security need” through an application programme.

After the announcement, Sweeney reacted on social media: “Let this be said that this doesn’t prevent us from tracking jets. We can still figure out who’s who via context clues.”

Previously, there were some regulatory measures in place to make it more difficult for aircraft to be tracked. Firstly, the FAA’s Limited Aircraft Data Displayed programme enables owners to request the agency tell third-party flight tracker services to withhold information like call signs and flight numbers. Also, the Privacy International Civil Aviation Organization can block some flight information from being broadcast across unencrypted aircraft transponders.

Gitman agrees with Sweeney that the new regulation will not change much. “It changes a few points around the disclosure of ownership. But Taylor Swift doesn’t own her aircraft in her name, Elon Musk doesn’t either, I am sure nobody does ever. People are not connecting the jet to the person through the trust or the corporation. They’re doing it because there’s a picture of him getting off this plane. Once you have that, you know who owns the aircraft.”