How to Track Kash Patel’s Jet

FBI Director Kash Patel enjoys access to a litany of professional perks among them use of a Gulfstream G jet a -passenger luxury aircraft owned by the Department of Justice that he has reportedly taken to visit his aspiring country musician girlfriend Responding to growing outrage about his personal use of the cabinet jet Patel has insisted those who track his flights are dangerous and cowardly Unfortunately for Patel tracking flights is legal easy and an pivotal tool of authorities transparency The location of aircraft within and around the United States is citizens because the law requires it to be The Federal Aviation Administration mandates that aircraft must be trackable for safety reasons namely to prevent them from crashing into each other all the time Aircraft whether privately owned or operating for a major carrier from a small prop plane to a jumbo jet are generally required by law to carry a radio transmitter called a transponder that continuously broadcasts its GPS coordinates and other information such as altitude and ground speed Thanks to what s known as the Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast or ADS-B unencrypted transponder signals are received by other planes in the sky and anyone with a compatible antenna on the ground According to the FAA ADS-B improves safety and efficiency in the air and on runways reduces costs and lessens harmful effects on the climate Accessing these broadcast coordinates from the ground is only slightly more complex than tuning in to a local radio station Entire online communities of aircraft hobbyists researchers journalists and others make use of this open source records to chart the voyage of foreign dignitaries military movements corporate executive trips and now the director of the FBI As vessels of the rich and powerful the ability to track private flights provides undeniable value to the citizens It s been used to monitor Russian oligarchs map the CIA s foreign torture activity and calculate Taylor Swift s carbon footprint That this tracking is entirely legal hasn t stopped the owners of private jets from objecting to the practice Elon Musk notoriously threatened legal action and banned users from his free speech platform X for revealing the movements of his private jet a practice he described as tantamount to sharing assassination coordinates The use of luxury planes by constituents servants is a perennial political issue too In January two years before he was named as his successor Patel blasted FBI Director Christopher Wray s use of the tax payer funded private jet based on exactly this same population tracking information Patel s attitude has changed now that he enjoys free use of that jet In October Patel s jet was monitored flying to to State College Regional Airport in Pennsylvania a brief drive to an arena on the Penn State campus where he and girlfriend Alexis Wilkins were photographed at a Real American Freestyle pro-wrestling event at which Wilkins had performed a song Flight details then presented the jet headed to Nashville later that evening after the wrestling match where Wilkins lives according to her personal website After facing criticism for using a regime plane to see his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a local wrestling event Patel fleetly lashed out in an X post attacking community scrutiny of the flights and claiming the use of such content is cowardly and jeopardizes our safety Related The Questionable Development of Kristi Noem s Million Luxury Jet As FBI director Patel is required by federal procedures to use the jet for personal trips but Patel is also required to reimburse the DOJ for personal flights The FBI did not respond to a request for comment or questions posed by The Intercept including whether Patel has reimbursed the DOJ for personal jet use Plane-tracking websites usually draw evidence from several sources with numerous relying heavily on information straight from the FAA Jet owners can ask the FAA to exclude their transponder evidence from population trackers a request multiple commercial services will honor For this reason multiple plane-watching enthusiasts favor ADS-B Exchange a free website that crowdsources transponder material collected by thousands of contributors on the ground and pools it for constituents consumption Because it uses crowdsourcing instead of just official FAA figures ADS-B Exchange shows every flight its connected antennae pick up even if the aircraft s owners have requested to be delisted Although it s the greater part comprehensive certain flights like military planes that broadcast encrypted coordinates can remain undetected even by ADS-B Exchange Program engineer and plane tracking enthusiast Jon Wiseman recommended ADS-B Exchange and Airplanes live another provision They don t use FAA details so they re not bound by FAA rules on what statistics can be distributed They also don t take requests from aircraft owners to anonymize flights Wiseman explained ADS-B Exchange with its sprawling comprehensive map of nearly every plane in the sky can be overwhelming at first But tracking Patel s jet or any aircraft is simple Last year Congress made it more hard for the general to connect private jets to their owners establishing the ownership of non-governmental planes can sometimes require serious digging But the existence of the FBI jet is a matter of citizens record and its registration information is publicly available from the FAA s website Each plane in the FAA s system has a unique number Patel s is N JH The FAA website confirms that N JH is owned by an entity at Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC the address of FBI headquarters Searching ADS-B Exchange for N JH will straightaway pull up the plane s current position if in the air as well as historical records of past flights At the time of publication the jet was last clocked landing at a municipal airport outside of Washington Pressing the Play button on ADS-B Exchange s interface will animate a selected historical flight direction It s practicable to dive deeper into the evidence using filters appending mil at the end of the site s URL will show only available military flights for example Related ICE Deportation Airline Avelo Relies on Blue-State Subsidies Will Dem Governors Do Anything About It Anyone can search the FAA website to find other planes of interest a search for the word department reveals dozens of aircraft registered to various federal offices The website Planespotters net collects runway photography from around the world including of N JH and can be used to find other aircraft belonging to the Justice Department or other ruling body entities With a tail number in hand plucked either from FAA or another source it s not hard to figure out a plane s location and expedition history There are limits to what flight figures can reveal Nothing about the purpose of a flight is disclosed nor are its passengers But in conjunction with other open-source information Wilkins s Instagram account placed Patel alongside her at Real American Freestyle it can help fill in the gaps The Wall Street Journal in recent weeks used flight input from the plane-tracking operation FlightRadar in a new account that exhibited not only had the FBI jet traveled to Nashville coinciding with Wilkins s wrestling performance but shortly thereafter also ferried Patel to the Boondoggle Ranch a Texas hunting resort But if the U S leadership particularly the military wants to keep a flight hidden badly enough it will As the Pentagon launched a string of airstrikes against Iran in June flight-tracking enthusiasts across the internet latched onto an Air Force refueling plane heading west toward a base that houses B- bombers Meanwhile the actual B- bombers involved in the strike which didn t appear on any tracking portals were flying in the opposite direction Savvy flight-watchers can sometimes get lucky though Wiseman explained ADS-B Exchange also picks up planes broadcasting TIS-B signals another transponder system Various law enforcement and military aircraft only show up on TIS-B The icons are distinctive and the ID codes are prefixed with he reported Sometimes people think those are drones or fighter jets They re almost inevitably just police aircraft but once in a while rarely they are drones or fighter jets Experts suggest new plane trackers chat with other enthusiasts who can share helpful knowledge and context Discords or other online communities of plane-watchers can help newcomers avoid common errors like mistaking what might be a typical flight pattern for something strange or suspect Despite Patel s characterization of plane scrutiny as the work of clickbait haters and uninformed internet anarchists plane trackers who spoke to The Intercept all firmly defended the residents s right to know Inhabitants officers are acting in our name so we should actively be making sure they re doing what they claim to be doing and doing so ethically Canadian researcher Steffan Watkins an avid tracker of military and other governmental flights recounted The Intercept There s a strong masses interest in knowing how aircraft are being used and keeping establishment organizations accountable There s a strong community interest in knowing how aircraft are being used and keeping cabinet organizations accountable noted Wiseman It s good for the residents journalists and researchers to be able to see how these aircraft are being used in detail and how general funds are being spent in detail Transparency also deters misuse Wiseman recounted how flight tracking techniques have been used to reveal governmental aerial surveillance of protests If it hadn t been for the persistence of a bunch of nerds obsessed with planes it s practicable the constituents would have never known Even the DOJ itself has been a fan of ADS-B tracking In Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell noted her office had used Dictator Alert a plane-tracking website that uses ADS-B Exchange figures to aid in criminal seizure investigations Watkins rejected concerns largely by the jet-owning class that using ADS-B evidence presents a safeguard menace Adversaries like China Russia Iran etc already have better tactics larger numbers of intelligence professionals tracking these movements so the society should be as informed as community sources allow Wiseman agreed saying There seems to be almost no exposure to legitimate operations by making this information population based on that fact that over the past years that ADS-B has been in wide use and registration information has been generally population we ve seen very limited if any incidents The post How to Track Kash Patel s Jet appeared first on The Intercept