Tactical Air Watch

Every aircraft above ten thousand feet broadcasts its position, altitude, and identification in clear radio at 1090 megahertz, roughly twice a second. The FAA mandates it. Air traffic controllers hear it. Hobbyists with thirty-dollar antennas hear it. So do we.

Tactical Air Watch tunes that chorus to a single playlist: over one hundred private aircraft owned by the most photographed, most followed, and most influential people on earth — billionaires, athletes, musicians, movie stars, politicians. The instant one of them taxis at Van Nuys, climbs out of Teterboro, or descends into Cabo, our watcher catches the broadcast and writes it down.

You're looking at the live result. Green dots are airborne aircraft — click one for altitude, speed, and a dashed line tracing where they took off from. Red dots are aircraft parked or just landed. Recent touchdowns appear below the map within minutes. Status badges update every thirty seconds; the watcher polls fresh radio every five minutes.

A word on privacy: the FAA's PIA program lets certain owners rotate their broadcast hex codes to break tracking. We respect those filings — flagged entries are left intentionally in the dark. Everything else is public information by federal mandate, hiding only behind the assumption that no one is paying attention.

We pay attention. Real-time flight intelligence used to cost five-figure subscriptions; this version is free, in your browser, curated by hand. If you find it interesting, the most useful thing you can do is keep coming back, share the link the next time something newsworthy crosses the sky, and tip us off when a tail number changes or a name belongs on the list. The sky is public — but only if someone is watching.

Crossed paths. In the Analytics tab you'll find a tool that does something the raw feed can't: it flags when two different tracked aircraft land at the same airport within a short window of each other. A single jet landing at Teterboro is routine and tells you nothing. But two — say a musician's and a studio executive's, forty minutes apart — is a coincidence worth a second look. It surfaces that overlap; it does not tell you what it means.

For reporters, that distinction is the whole point. A co-arrival is a lead, not a story. It tells you where to start looking — a deal that might be forming, a reconciliation, a quiet negotiation, a board meeting nobody announced — but proximity at a public airport is circumstantial by nature. Private aviation clusters at a handful of fields, so some overlaps are pure chance. The value is in the correlation: pair a flagged co-arrival with a corporate filing, a venue booking, a social post, a source's tip, and you may have something. On its own it's a pattern, not a proof. Treat every match as the first phone call, never the headline — and the tool earns its place in a newsroom rather than a rumor mill.

Gatherings. Crossed paths watches for two jets; the convergence tool watches for crowds. When three or more tracked aircraft land at the same airport within a single day, it flags the cluster — because that is what a gathering of the powerful actually looks like from the ground. Jets don't arrive in formation; they trickle into Sun Valley, Aspen, or Davos over a day or two for a conference, a retreat, a deal. Three or more is also far harder to wave off as coincidence than a single pair. The same caution applies: it shows you who was in one place at one time, not why — a starting point, not a conclusion.

The carbon scoreboard. In the Analytics tab we turn the flight log into something else the raw feed can't show: an estimate of how much carbon dioxide each tracked jet has put into the atmosphere. Private aviation is among the most carbon-intensive ways a person can travel — a single long-haul trip in a large-cabin jet can emit more than the average person does in a year — and the scoreboard ranks every tracked owner, worst to best, by their all-time estimated total.

How the number is built. For each completed flight we know the aircraft type and how long it was airborne. Every type burns fuel at a roughly known rate — a light Cirrus sips around 70 gallons an hour; a Boeing 767 bizjet drinks more than 1,500. We multiply that burn rate by the hours flown to get fuel used, then apply the standard conversion that burning one kilogram of jet fuel releases about 3.16 kilograms of CO₂. Sum every flight and you have a person's running total, which we also express as a share of the whole tracked group.

Read it as an estimate, not a meter reading. These figures are deliberately honest about their limits. Real fuel burn shifts with payload, altitude, routing, headwinds, and time spent taxiing, and we only count flights our watcher actually logged — so a jet we missed simply isn't in its owner's total. The scoreboard is built to show scale and ranking, the order of magnitude and who sits where, not an audited emissions ledger. As with everything here, it points you at a fact worth knowing; it doesn't pretend to be the last word.