When powerful people make potentially apocalyptic threats, plenty of people doomscroll. Artist and developer Kyle McDonald took a different approach: He started tracking private jets.
The result is an online tool he calls the "Apocalypse Early Warning System," built to flag unusual spikes in flights by business jets, military aircraft, and planes with masked identifiers. As Straight Arrow News reported, the premise is both simple and unnerving: If insiders and the ultra-wealthy know bad news is coming, their travel patterns might reveal it before anything else does.
"In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers," the website explains. "This site tracks this indicator in realtime."
McDonald said he first noticed a rise in private-aircraft activity around April 7, when President Donald Trump threatened to wipe out a "whole civilization," according to SAN. The pattern made him wonder whether people with the most money and access were responding to something the broader public had not yet fully grasped.
Less than two weeks later, while reading about roughly $1 billion in prediction-market bets placed with remarkable timing around a potential war with Iran, McDonald said the idea came into focus. If insider movement really does happen ahead of major geopolitical events, he thought, maybe he can spot it in the skies.
The tracker draws from public data sources, including the Federal Aviation Administration's registry and ADS-B Exchange, which collects aircraft radio signals. It compares current flights with historical patterns and assigns an emergency level from 1 to 5 based on how unusual the number of aircraft in the air appears to be.
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Users can check the current emergency level on the website. McDonald also added text and email alerts for those who want a heads-up when activity surges.
"Level 5 means the current count is an extreme positive outlier under this model," the site states.
The site makes clear that a Level 5 alert is not a guarantee of catastrophe — holiday travel like the 19 private jets seen leaving Maui on Thanksgiving last year, big sports or political events like the Super Bowl, data glitches, or cohort errors can all create false positives — but it keeps an archive so people can review those past anomalies for themselves.
Even if the project is partly tongue-in-cheek, it hits on a very real public frustration. Private jets have become a symbol of extreme inequality and disproportionate climate pollution. Sales are on the rise, too, and a 2024 report found that passengers in large private jets produce more carbon dioxide in one hour than the average person does in a year.
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Communities absorb the costs of dirtier air, rising temperatures, and global instability, while the people contributing most to the problem can often afford to leave first. It is a bleak dynamic — and part of the reason public-interest tracking tools like McDonald's and TheAirTraffic.com continue to attract attention.
That kind of transparency is not universally welcome. Elon Musk has argued that jet tracking puts his family at risk, Taylor Swift reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter over similar tracking, and Congress has weighed limits on access to aircraft data.
For now, though, McDonald told SAN that the silence around his project may mean it "does not actually disturb the comfortable."
"But," he added, "it might make the disturbed laugh."
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