Flight Dept JULY21.qxp_Finance 20/07/2021 14:37 Page 1
FLIGHT DEPARTMENT MANAGEMENT
How to Fly Incognito in the USA The mandating of ADS-B Out use for flights in most US airspace made it very difficult for owners and operators of business aircraft to prevent third parties from knowing where they were flying. Chris Kjelgaard explores the practical solution for most domestic US flights.
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ntil the FAA made ADS-B Out use mandatory for flights in most US airspace in 2020, it was fairly easy for owners and operators of business aircraft to prevent the public – particularly business rivals, criminals and terrorists – from knowing exactly where in the nation each of their flights was bound. Before then, US Business Aviation operators could make use of an FAA program known as Limited Aircraft Data Displayed (LADD), previously known as the Blocked Aircraft Registration Request (BARR) program in either of two ways to keep the details of their domestic flights hidden from not-so-casual thirdparty interest, according to Christian Renneissen, Collins Aerospace’s manager for flight deck connectivity. One way operators could use LADD was to ask the FAA to block their flight details going to vendors of flight tracking data at the source level, by asking the FAA itself not to provide that data to the vendors. (Until ADS-B Out use became mandatory in the US, flight tracking data vendors relied on air traffic control data provided by the FAA as the source of their data on all US flights.)
90 Vol 25 Issue 8 2021 AVBUYER MAGAZINE
The second way, according to Renneissen, was for Business Aviation operators to ask the flight tracking vendors not to make the details of their flights available to the public, but to provide each operator’s details to that operator to allow it to track its own flights. This process is called “limiting the display of aircraft data at the subscriber level” and is requested from the FAA. Most operators chose the second option, and some reputable flight-tracking vendors (FlightAware being one example) continue to honor such LADD requests to this day, Renneissen says. However, the mandating of ADS-B Out usage in most US airspace, and the consequent growth of a number of web-based flight tracking vendors which display flight data based purely on ADS-B broadcasts has made the LADD program much less effective, according to Renneissen. These vendors take data received by many thousands of inexpensive, privately-owned ADS-B receivers worldwide and aggregate the data to provide a global, real-time picture of nearly all ADS-Bequipped flights taking place at any given time. (Obtaining live ADS-B data from flights in mid-oceanic
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