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A major independent flight tracking platform that antagonized the Saudi royal family and Elon Musk has been sold to a subsidiary of a private equity firm. And that user is furious.
The ADS-B Exchange has been making headlines in recent months as an annoyance to “billionaires and thugs,” as AFP puts it. But in a press release Wednesday morning, aviation information company Jetnet announced that it had acquired the silly open source operation for an undisclosed amount.
Jetnet, which primarily provides information for the airline industry, was itself acquired by private equity firm Silversmith Capital Partners last year. According to the company’s press release, “This acquisition is Jetnet’s second of what the company expects to be several future acquisitions as it expands its data-driven product offerings for the aviation industry. “
The deal was not welcomed by the user base that makes up the ADBS-B Exchange. “I don’t see a long future for his ADSBx under PE. [private equity] wrote one user on the ADS-B Exchange’s Discord server. “And definitely not all information services that show all data as they do today. Salary was bigger than vision.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if it got censored because it’s owned by PE,” another user chimed in.
ADS-B Exchange, like its larger competitors FlightRadar24 and FlightAware, uses aircraft registration information to track aircraft flight paths and provide access to historical trip data. As WIRED reported last month, that data will be very useful to airplane spotters, open source researchers, and aviation regulators.
What distinguishes the ADS-B Exchange from other more established operations is the source of the data. FlightAware and FlightRadar24 have dedicated teams of volunteer and amateur data collectors (feeders), but also rely heavily on government feeds such as the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
ADS-B Exchange, on the other hand, is completely user-supported. Volunteers around the world set up receivers designed to receive real-time data from planes in flight. It then feeds that data into the ADS-B Exchange’s software. The ADS-B Exchange’s software compiles thousands of inputs and displays real-time maps of all in-flight flights around the world.
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), the standard exchanges rely on, is becoming increasingly popular and mandated by the FAA. It’s the standard that makes the ADS-B Exchange so damned by Musk and the Saudis. Aircraft owners who do not want their flight paths made available to the public can submit a request to the FAA. This may require downstream users of feeds such as FlightRadar24 and FlightAware to hide that information. ADS-B is transmitted unencrypted directly from the plane itself, so that kind of censorship is not possible.
The ADS-B Exchange administrators pride themselves on never hiding flight data. James Stanford, one of his senior administrators at the ADS-B Exchange, told WIRED that his website for the company is used to track down gold smugglers and kidnappers, and that private He said he was threatened by billionaires and warlords who hated being chased by jets.
