When President Donald Trump threatened to wipe out a “whole civilization” on April 7, artist and developer Kyle McDonald looked to the skies.
But McDonald wasn’t scanning for a barrage of ballistic missiles headed toward Iran. Instead, he was analyzing the skies from his computer, particularly for the movement of private jets.
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Tracking private jets has become increasingly popular in recent years, whether to shame artists like Taylor Swift for her carbon footprint or to simply monitor the activity of billionaires like Elon Musk.
McDonald told Straight Arrow that he witnessed a notable spike in flights by private aircraft around the time of Trump’s threats.
“Was it because Trump was threatening genocide without even getting the approval of Congress?” McDonald asked sarcastically. “Hard to say.”
The surge in activity led McDonald to wonder: Do the wealthiest among us know something that we don’t?
Inside information
Less than two weeks later, while reading about the perfect timing of $1 billion in prediction-market bets about the Iran war, an idea came to McDonald: the “Apocalypse Early Warning System.”
McDonald surmised that if government insiders and the ultra-wealthy know about major military actions ahead of time, a sudden and drastic uptick in private jet flights could be a signal of something dire.
“So I decided to build a tracker to figure it out and watch for signs of insider movement,” McDonald said.
The system works by watching a select group of business jets, military aircraft and planes that have disabled their identifiers to determine whether, based on historical flight data, an unusual number are currently airborne.
The tracker uses data from sources such as the Federal Aviation Administration’s public registry and ADS-B Exchange, a platform which collects radio signals transmitted from aircraft across the globe.
Users can visit the site to see how many of the tracked aircraft are airborne and the current emergency level of 1 to 5.
“Level 5 means the current count is an extreme positive outlier under this model,” the website says. “It can still be caused by holidays, major sporting or political events, data artifacts, or cohort mistakes. The archive is included so those historical false positives are visible.”
McDonald has also introduced text message and email alerts for those who want to know when such an uptick occurs.
Are the comfortable disturbed?
Both private — as in rich — individuals and the government have pushed back against the increased interest in tracking private jets.
Musk alleged that tracking his private jet, even though the information is public, put him and his family at risk of “assassination.” Swift sent a cease-and-desist letter to a college student who built a website for tracking her jet. A bill in Congress would establish requirements and limitations for accessing aircraft data.
Yet McDonald’s tracker, at least for now, does not appear to have ruffled any feathers.
McDonald told Straight Arrow that the lack of outrage must mean that his “project does not actually disturb the comfortable.”
“But,” he said, “it might make the disturbed laugh.”
