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FBI Director Kash<\/span> Patel enjoys access to a litany of professional perks, among them use of a Gulfstream G550 jet, a 15-passenger luxury aircraft owned by the Department of Justice that he has reportedly taken to visit his aspiring country musician girlfriend. Responding to growing outrage about his personal use of the government jet, Patel has insisted those who track his flights are dangerous and cowardly.<\/p>\n Unfortunately for Patel, tracking flights is legal, easy, and an important tool of government transparency.<\/p>\n The location of aircraft within and around the United States is public because the law requires it to be: The Federal Aviation Administration mandates that aircraft must be trackable for safety reasons, namely, to prevent them from crashing into each other all the time. Aircraft, whether privately owned or operating for a major carrier, from a small prop plane to a jumbo jet, are generally required by law to carry a radio transmitter, called a transponder, that continuously broadcasts its GPS coordinates and other information, such as altitude and ground speed. Thanks to what\u2019s known as the Automatic Dependent Surveillance\u2013Broadcast, or ADS-B, unencrypted transponder signals are received by other planes in the sky and anyone with a compatible antenna on the ground. According to the FAA, \u201cADS-B improves safety and efficiency in the air and on runways, reduces costs, and lessens harmful effects on the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n Accessing these broadcast coordinates from the ground is only slightly more complex than tuning in to a local radio station. Entire online communities of aircraft hobbyists, researchers, journalists, and others make use of this open source data to chart the travel of foreign dignitaries, military movements, corporate executive trips, and, now, the director of the FBI.<\/p>\n As vessels of the rich and powerful, the ability to track private flights provides undeniable value to the public<\/a>: It\u2019s been used to monitor Russian oligarchs, map the CIA\u2019s foreign torture<\/a> program, and calculate<\/a> Taylor Swift\u2019s carbon footprint. That this tracking is entirely legal hasn\u2019t stopped the owners of private jets from objecting to the practice. Elon Musk notoriously threatened legal action and banned<\/a> users<\/a> from his \u201cfree speech\u201d platform X for revealing the movements of his private jet, a practice he described as tantamount to sharing \u201cassassination coordinates.\u201d The use of luxury planes by public servants is a perennial political issue too. In January 2023, two years before he was named as his successor, Patel blasted <\/a>FBI Director Christopher Wray\u2019s use of the \u201ctax payer funded private jet\u201d based on exactly this same public tracking data.<\/p>\n Patel\u2019s attitude has changed now that he enjoys free use of that jet. In October, Patel\u2019s jet was monitored flying to to State College Regional Airport in Pennsylvania, a brief drive to an arena on the Penn State campus where he and girlfriend Alexis Wilkins were photographed at a Real American Freestyle pro-wrestling event at which Wilkins had performed a song. Flight data then showed the jet headed to Nashville later that evening after the wrestling match, where Wilkins lives, according to her personal website. After facing criticism for using a government plane to see his girlfriend sing the national anthem at a local wrestling event, Patel quickly lashed out in an X post<\/a>, attacking public scrutiny of the flights and claiming the use of such data is \u201ccowardly and jeopardizes our safety.\u201d<\/p>\n As FBI director, Patel is required<\/a> by federal policy to use the jet for personal trips, but Patel is also required to reimburse<\/a> the DOJ for personal flights. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment or questions posed by The Intercept, including whether Patel has reimbursed the DOJ for personal jet use.<\/p>\n Plane-tracking websites usually draw data from several sources, with many relying heavily on information straight from the FAA. Jet owners can ask the FAA to exclude their transponder data from public trackers, a request many commercial services will honor. For this reason, many plane-watching enthusiasts favor ADS-B Exchange<\/a>, a free website that crowdsources transponder data collected by thousands of volunteers on the ground and pools it for public consumption. Because it uses crowdsourcing instead of just official FAA data, ADS-B Exchange shows every flight its connected antennae pick up \u2014 even if the aircraft\u2019s owners have requested to be delisted. (Although it\u2019s the most comprehensive, certain flights, like military planes that broadcast encrypted coordinates, can remain undetected even by ADS-B Exchange.)<\/p>\n Software engineer and plane tracking enthusiast John Wiseman recommended ADS-B Exchange<\/a> and Airplanes.live<\/a>, another service. \u201cThey don\u2019t use FAA data, so they\u2019re not bound by FAA rules on what data can be distributed. They also don\u2019t take requests from aircraft owners to anonymize flights,\u201d Wiseman explained.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n ADS-B Exchange, with its sprawling, comprehensive map of nearly every plane in the sky, can be overwhelming at first. But tracking Patel\u2019s jet (or any aircraft) is simple. Last year Congress made it more difficult<\/a> for the public to connect private jets to their owners; establishing the ownership of non-governmental planes can sometimes require serious digging. But the existence of the FBI jet is a matter of public record, and its registration information is publicly available from the FAA\u2019s website. Each plane in the FAA\u2019s system has a unique number: Patel\u2019s is N708JH. The FAA website confirms that N708JH is owned by an entity at 935 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, the address of FBI headquarters. Searching ADS-B Exchange for N708JH will immediately pull up the plane\u2019s current position, if in the air, as well as historical records of past flights. At the time of publication, the jet was last clocked<\/a> landing at a municipal airport outside of Washington.<\/p>\n Pressing the \u201cPlay\u201d button on ADS-B Exchange\u2019s interface will animate a selected historical flight route. It\u2019s possible to dive deeper into the data using filters; appending \u201c?mil=1\u201d at the end of the site\u2019s URL will show only available military flights, for example.<\/p>\n Anyone can search the FAA website to find other planes of interest; a search for the word \u201cdepartment\u201d reveals dozens of aircraft registered to various federal offices. The website Planespotters.net collects runway photography from around the world, including of N708JH<\/a>, and can be used to find other aircraft belonging<\/a> to the Justice Department or other government entities. With a tail number in hand plucked either from FAA or another source, it\u2019s not hard to figure out a plane\u2019s location and travel history.<\/p>\n There are limits to what flight data can reveal. Nothing about the purpose of a flight is disclosed, nor are its passengers. But in conjunction with other open-source information \u2014 Wilkins\u2019s Instagram account<\/a> placed Patel alongside her at Real American Freestyle \u2014 it can help fill in the gaps.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n