Is flight tracking the new Netflix?

Flight tracking has been described as the “sleeper hit of the summer” and a chance to “participate in history in real time” as the hobby’s popularity continues to soar.

Whether it’s following the flights of politicians such as Nancy Pelosi and Alexei Navalny, or pop stars such as Taylor Swift, millions are now “tuning in to watch little yellow plane icons move across a map of the world”, said The Guardian.

Pelosi and Aubameyang

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s controversial flight to Taiwan was the single most tracked flight of all time, according to the online tracking site Flightradar24.

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The website said that more than 708,000 people were tracking the flight when it landed in the Taiwanese capital of Taipei, and more than 2.9 million people had tracked at least a portion of the flight.

In a blog post, Flightradar24, which was started as a passion project by two aviation enthusiasts, said that traffic on its website became so heavy that it nearly brought down the tracker, which uses a network of receivers to pin down planes’ location and speed.

Around 550,000 viewers tracked the flight of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as he returned to Moscow last year to face imprisonment, reported Yahoo Finance. A US air force Global Hawk, travelling around Ukraine during the Russian invasion, was also heavily followed.

Flight tracking has also become a popular tool for football fans who want to follow the movements of star players during transfer windows. For instance, SportBible reported in 2018 that around 32,000 Arsenal fans tracked Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang’s private flight from Dortmund to London, ahead of the striker’s move to the Gunners.

“We see the most interest during the European football transfer window,” Ian Petchenik, head of communications for Flightradar24, told The Guardian.

“The teams have very dedicated fanbases. They will figure out what flight their favourite player is on, and they will follow that flight.”

Swift’s air miles

The trend has led to some celebrities being criticised for the impact their flights have on the environment. Earlier this month a survey found that Taylor Swift’s private jet has taken 170 flights between 1 January and 29 July 2022, clocking up 15.9 days in the air with an average flight time of just 80 minutes and 139.36 miles per flight.

The sustainability marketing firm Yard claimed that Taylor’s total flight emissions for 2022 were calculated at 8,293.54 tonnes – 1,184.8 times more than the average person’s total annual emissions. However, a spokesperson for the pop star dismissed reports that she is the celebrity with the highest private jet emissions as “blatantly incorrect”, said The Times.

Nevertheless, the Celebrity Jets Twitter account automatically tracks certain aircraft, leading to other celebrities such as Drake, Travis Scott and Kylie Jenner facing criticism for taking “strikingly short flights” at a time of “profound climate crisis”, said The Guardian.

The backlash begins

This sort of attention has led one celebrity to put his foot down. Elon Musk offered a teenager $5,000 to stop tracking his private jet flights on the Twitter account @ElonJet, reported Forbes. Jack Sweeney asked for the sum to be increased to $50,000, after which Musk “ghosted him”.

The 19-year-old has since declared that he’s “pretty confident” he is also able to track the whereabouts of Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg’s private jet, reported Inquirer.

Aviation privacy may be revamped in response to these sorts of accounts, reported The Independent. Although the Federal Aviation Administration allows some planes to shield their identity from the public on government data streams, open-source sites can still capture public aircraft transponder data.

“Flight-stalking” of figures such as Musk and Zuckerberg “underscores the need to ensure that people aren’t required to surrender their personal security and safety just because they get on an airplane”, Dan Hubbard, spokesperson for the National Business Aviation Association, told Forbes.

Flight tracking “irks tycoons and baddies”, said The Jordan Times. It added that Chinese state media reported in 2021 that the government had confiscated hundreds of receivers used in crowd-sourced flight tracking, citing the risk of “espionage”.