First modification:
Monitoring planes has become very common these days. This has to do, on the one hand, with the great expectation generated by the flight of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan, amid threats from China. And on the other, the outrage aroused by several world celebrities after it was revealed that they used their private jets to make countless short trips, generating a disproportionate effect on the environment.
The flight of the plane in which the president of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, traveled to Taiwan was the most tracked of all time, according to Flightradar24, a website that shows real-time information on air traffic. .
According to those responsible for the page, the route of SPAR19, as the flight was identified, has been viewed by almost three million people since it took off from Malaysia. And by the time he landed in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, he was being tracked by more than 708,000 people around the world.
With nearly 3 million people following SPAR19’s flight from Kuala Lumpur to Taipei was our most tracked ever, but its flights throughout Asia were all closely watched—sometimes by hundreds of thousands of people. See the full flight path for SPAR19 at https://t.co/y7ZttV8SgY pic.twitter.com/gxqjSVVREQ
— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) August 6, 2022
The massive attention on this trip was due to the high tension generated by the visit, the doubts until the last moment and the unconfirmed versions that China could intercept the US plane, a scenario that was never contemplated.
How flight tracking pages work
Flightradar24 is perhaps the most popular site for live flight tracking, but it’s not the only one. Before Pelosi to Taiwan, the route most tracked by this page had been that of the Russian opponent Alexei Navalny. More than 550,000 people were watching his trip when he decided to return home from Germany, where he was recovering after being poisoned.
This feature is made possible by an aircraft technology known as Autonomic Dependent Surveillance System or ADS-B. And that in simple terms, it allows planes to transmit their locations to a kind of receivers connected to sites like Flightradar24.
As explained by the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’, to optimize its operation, this website relies on tools from the US government, which forces it to comply with several rules so as not to show the location of certain types of flights.
But to cover this gap there is another page called ADS-B Exchange, which, as described on its page, does not carry out any type of filter and whose technology was recently used to expose celebrities who have made frequent use of their private planes, which has had a disproportionate impact on the environment. This is why they have earned the nickname “climate criminals”
Kylie Jenner’s Jet Took off from Camarillo, California, US. Going to Van Nuys, California, US (VNY, Van Nuys Airport) arriving in ~3m. pic.twitter.com/Jo0ZAfaJ69
— Celebrity Jets (@CelebJets) July 13, 2022
‘Toxic’ celebrities exposed
The controversy erupted in mid-July when a Twitter account called Celebrity Jets, which reports the flights made by celebrities, revealed that the youngest of the Kardashians, Kylie Jenner, made a plane trip that lasted only three minutes.
The outrage grew when this young woman posted on her Instagram account a photo with her husband in which two jets are seen and with a comment saying that she can’t decide which plane to take.
Based on this data, the marketing company Yard made a ranking with the biggest offenders against the environment. The company points out that this list is not conclusive since there is no way of knowing if the owners of these jets “were on all the registered flights.” But that the purpose was to “highlight the harmful impact of the use of private aircraft.”
While with their daily actions an average person emits about seven tons of CO2 a year, one of the main causes of global warming, the report revealed that, so far this year on flights alone, singer Taylor Swift, who is the First on the list, it produced more than 8,000 tons of this gas.
They are followed by boxer Floyd Mayweather, with more than 7,000 tons; rapper Jay-Z, with more than 6,900; baseball player Alex Rodríguez, with more than 5,300 and country music performer Blake Shelton with 4,495.
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