Romanticizing Flight
One of the most interesting aspects of aviation to me is the purpose of a flight. When I see an airliner flying overhead I imagine the stories of the passengers on that flight and what circumstances led them to be on that plane at that time.
When I see a business jet I wonder what business the owner of the plane is engaged in. I am fascinated by the stories. I am naturally an incredibly curious individual and aviation allows me to always dig deep into something.
Using OSINT to Identify Aircraft Owners
You may have heard of the term OSINT before. OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence. It boils down to gathering publicly available information to answer questions about an individual or business from free, legal, and public sources.
FlightAware is a good and common example of using OSINT to identify aircraft in the air along with who the aircraft is registered to. However, for a price an aircraft owner/operator can hide their flight activity from the service. That is where a service like ADSBexchange comes into place as you can not restrict that data.
Imagine where you launch ADSBexchange and you click on a plane flying overhead and its registered owner is something like Coffe Cup 3 LLC then how are you suppose to figure out who actually owns that? Well, if you type the N number into Flightaware then it will show you the registrant’s name and the state that the LLC is registered in.
Once you have the LLC name and the state then you can google that state’s secretary of state website and look for the entity search option. Type in the name of the LLC and you’ll likely be provided with the name and address of the registrant.
If you do this often enough you’ll quickly see that a lot of aircraft are registered under trusts which are set up differently than LLCs and corporations and can be much harder to find the actual beneficiary but there are many available resources still.
Interesting Companies
I have discovered companies that I never knew existed that are incredibly fascinating and fun seeing businesses passed down from generation to generation. Some examples that come to mind; are a company that specializes in making ropes for the tug boat industry, a sweet potato farmer, and a world-renowned neurosurgeon with dozens of patents.
Aviate Alabama has extensive knowledge and experience in using OSINT techniques to identify aircraft owners and operators. If you are in need of identifying an aircraft owner and would like our assistance then please reach out brian@aviatealabama.com
