ADS-B and transponder tracking for OSINT investigators

Block

02 · Maritime and Aviation Tracking

Topic

ADS-B Aircraft Tracking

Tools

ADS-B Exchange · FlightRadar24 · OpenSky Network · FAA Registry

Difficulty

Intermediate

Prerequisites

Detecting deepfakes in video and audio verification.

See also: Aviation OSINT: flight tracking to evidentiary standard and Aircraft registration and ownership databases for the reference-card versions of this workflow.

Every powered aircraft is broadcasting its own position

Most commercial aircraft, and a growing share of private jets, continuously transmit their identity, position and altitude over an open radio standard. The signal is free to receive, and unless the owner has taken deliberate steps to suppress it, free to analyse.

ADS-B was built for air traffic safety, not privacy. An aircraft equipped with an ADS-B transponder broadcasts its identity, GPS position, altitude and speed roughly twice a second, on a public frequency any suitably tuned receiver can pick up. A global network of hobbyist and commercial receivers collects this data and republishes it through flight-tracking websites, most free to use.

For an investigator, that broadcast is a movement record an owner cannot fully control. Undisclosed travel, sanctions-evasion routing and the real use of a jet nominally owned by a shell company have all been documented from ADS-B data. This tutorial covers reading raw transponder data, resolving a hex code to a registered aircraft and its ownership trail, working around common redaction requests, and building a flight record that will hold up in publication.

In the field

Investigating the wealth of Kazakhstan's former president Nursultan Nazarbayev, OCCRP reporters obtained a document showing his charitable foundation had received an import-duty exemption for a new Airbus ACJ320neo worth more than $100 million. The document gave only an import date and aircraft type, not a tail number or hex code.

Document-led filtering. Reporters used the import date and aircraft type to search uncensored flight data by plane type and take-off and landing location, and found only one ACJ320neo had flown in Kazakh airspace since June 2020.
Uncensored data source. The search ran on Icarus Flights, a C4ADS platform fed by ADS-B Exchange data, which does not honour the redaction requests that standard consumer trackers apply.
Movement correlation. A follow-up pull from OpenSky Network surfaced further flights, including one to Moscow the same day the Kremlin announced Nazarbayev had held a working meeting with Putin, plus domestic trips matching his public appearances: evidence, in OCCRP's own framing, that the jet was used by Nazarbayev despite its formal ownership by a charity.

OCCRP · The Nazarbayev Billions · January 2022

Learning outcomes

By the end of this tutorial you will be able to:

Read raw ADS-B and Mode-S transponder data (hex code, callsign, position, altitude) from a public tracker
Resolve an aircraft's hex code to its registration, model and country of registration
Identify when an aircraft's tracking data has been redacted and select an uncensored data source
Cross-reference flight endpoints against a subject's claimed or reported movements to build a corroborated travel record
Document a flight history to an evidentiary standard suitable for publication

The rest of this tutorial is for Signal subscribers.

What remains: the decision framework, the tool configuration, the failure modes, and the evidentiary standard required to use the finding defensibly. Signal is €90 a year, or €9 a month. Students, €49 a year.

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Tracking aircraft with ADS-B and transponder records

Every powered aircraft is broadcasting its own position

Learning outcomes

The rest of this tutorial is for Signal subscribers.

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