A palace in a Boeing 747 for free? Ha! Source: YouTube
The San Antonio Express-News reported last week that modifications are almost complete in the “flying palace” that Qatar gave to Trump last year: Trump’s Qatari dream jet sets course for Air Force One duty by July 4.
The ultra-rich who already own a big chunk of the planet and who intend to own and control the rest of it all fly around the world in private jets. Increasingly they are contriving to keep these flights secret, but to some degree they can still be tracked.
The Washington Post had a fascinating story last week on how someone built a system for tracking “business jets,” monitoring for a situation in which a large number of these jets converge in one place. The story is Want to track the apocalypse? One theory: Follow the billionaires’ jets.
That’s a brilliant idea. That apocalypse-watch system avoids intimidation by not tracking any oligarch in particular. You may remember the case of the young guy who was targeted by Elon Musk after the guy tracked Musk’s jet and reported the jet’s moves on social media.
All this gave me an idea. I have been using Claude Code to write programs for me, and it has done a fine job. For example, I now have a searchable database of the complete works of Sir Walter Scott, as well as a searchable database of Scott’s letters.
I asked Claude if it would be feasible to track a bunch of planes belonging to super-rich evildoers, log the data into a database, and use that database as a tool for open-source intelligence, which is the only kind of intelligence available to those of us who are poor but who crave to understand what is going on in the world. (I am hardly the only person doing this kind of thing.)
Claude said sure. The work took about two days of Claude time. Claude Code built the system for me in 14 steps — among them acquiring the “tail numbers” and other information about jets to track, creating a database schema, finding a free source of ADS-B tracking data, capturing the data and poking it into the database, and building interfaces to query the database using a web page and an RSS feed.
My system has been running now for only three days. It will take a while to build a strong database containing some very useful history. Most of those planes don’t fly every day. But even after three days, it’s getting interesting.
I don’t have any data yet on American tech billionaires. I’m not sure yet whether that’s because they haven’t flown in the past three days or they have a means of keeping their ADS-B tracking data out of public databases. (I won’t try to describe ADS-B here except to say that every plane of any size is required to constantly transmit a stream of data about its location, altitude, etc. Thousands of ground receivers collect this data. It’s perfectly legal. It’s how you can go on line to see whether the plane you have to meet at the airport is going to be on time. It’s how I know that an Air France flight from Atlanta to Paris often passes right over my house at 9 p.m.)
I am seeing, though, a great deal of flying about by foreign royalty and oligarchs — Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Russia in particular. For example, what does Qatar, a tiny but super-rich oil country ruled by a royal family, have to do with China? I have no idea, but a Qatari Airbus landed in Beijing on Monday, a couple of days before Trump arrives. Is that merely a coincidence? I don’t know, but one of the things to watch for is the sneaky ways global oligarchs meet up to coordinate their moves. The database that Claude built for me has some special logic to monitor for convergences. As for Qatar and Trump, it has long been obvious that they’re trading favors.
As much as I would like to, I can’t put this database on line, because it would attract the wrong kind of attention. But this is one of the ways I try to watch a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere.
A screen capture from my database built by Claude
Update:
Source: Flightradar24
This morning my flight tracking database reported that a plane owned by the U.S. Department of Justice, and believed to be Kash Patel’s plane, was over the North Atlantic. I verified this with FlightRadar24, which says the plane is en route from Richmond, Virginia, to Ankara, Turkey. Why would Patel be going to Turkey? A Google search doesn’t find anything written about that. Patel was just dragged over the coals by a Senate committee for his promiscuous travel at taxpayer expense.
Fascinating work David, I look forward to hearing what else you might pick up.
Hi Chenda: The database is working. After I wrote the post this morning, it reported that Elon Musk’s plane flew from Austin, Texas, to Aurora (near Denver). The media are reporting that Musk is in China with Trump, so I can only guess why Musk’s plane flew to Denver. A good guess would be that it’s Musk’s legal people, on a mission related to resisting Colorado’s AI law. I will use both Claude and ChatGPT to try to follow up on database hits. Not only can they quickly surveil social media — nauseating work that I don’t have the time or stomach to do — but they also can read sources in pretty much any language.