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Overlap Recovery

The 73-overlap claim is a spreadsheet. Each row says: on this date, this Egyptian government jet was at this American city, where a Kirk was. Most of those rows have never had a primary flight record behind them — they rest on a screenshot of a tracking site, or on somebody's summary of one.

Every row that can be reduced to an aircraft and a date was pulled directly from the raw ADS-B archives. 69 distinct (aircraft, date) pairs, each one asked of both free daily archives — globe.airplanes.live and adsb.lol — on the alleged day and the UTC day either side, because an evening departure in the United States lands on tomorrow's date in UTC.

Alleged (aircraft, date) pairs tested69
A real ADS-B track exists on the alleged day23
A track exists only on a neighbouring day7
Neither free archive holds anything in the three-day window39
Of the 23: the track puts the aircraft in the alleged country21
Of the 23: the track puts it somewhere else entirely2

Two aircraft account for the whole set: SU-BTT (Dassault Falcon 7X, hex 0101D3) appears in 53 of the 69 pairs, and SU-BND (Gulfstream, hex 01003E) in the other 16.

What this tests, and what it cannot touch​

This tests the flight leg. It does not test the shadowing. That distinction is the whole page, so it is stated before the data rather than after it.

An ADS-B trace establishes that an airframe was in a place at a time. It establishes nothing about who was aboard it, and nothing at all about where anybody named Kirk was that day. A recovered track showing SU-BTT on the ramp at Wichita is not evidence that Charlie or Erika Kirk was in Wichita. It is evidence that the aeroplane was.

The overlap claim is a pairing — aircraft here, person here, therefore following. Everything on this page speaks to the first half of that pairing only. The second half still rests on a set of Kirk locations this repository cannot reproduce, and for Erika Kirk in particular no dated itinerary has ever been published. That gap is untouched by any amount of ADS-B work, and it is the weakest point in the aircraft angle. See Erika Flight Logs Erased.

Two further limits carry through every line below:

  • A nearest-airport label is geometry, not a landing record. The label is simply the closest known field to the first and last position in the trace. The distance is printed beside it every time so the reader can judge it. A 1.4 km label is an aircraft on the airport; a 40 km label is an aircraft that was still airborne when the last receiver lost it.
  • An absent track is an absent track. It means a volunteer receiver network heard nothing. It does not mean the aircraft did not fly, and it does not mean a transponder was switched off. Both free daily archives begin in 2023, so a 2022 miss is guaranteed by construction and proves nothing whatever.

The twenty-three rows that now have primary data​

One row per alleged overlap that came back with a track on the alleged day. Where the track starts and where it ends are the first and last positions in the recovered trace, labelled with the nearest known field and the exact distance to it. Points is the number of position reports in the trace — the higher it is, the more of the flight was actually heard.

The two rows that do not check out are in bold.

Overlap ID(s)AircraftAlleged dateAlleged placeTrack startsTrack endsPointsVerdict
OWENS-046SU-BTT2023-02-25St. Louis, MOLFAD Compiègne Margny Airfield, Margny-lès-Compiègne FR — 13.26 kmKSUS Spirit of St Louis Airport, St Louis MO — 2.22 km722Consistent
OWENS-010SU-BTT2023-04-01St. Louis, MOLFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 1.75 kmKSUS Spirit of St Louis Airport, St Louis MO — 2.54 km897Consistent
OWENS-011SU-BTT2023-04-06Wilmington, DEKSUS Spirit of St Louis Airport, St Louis MO — 0.34 kmKILG Wilmington Airport, Wilmington DE — 1.63 km622Consistent
OWENS-012SU-BTT2023-04-14Wichita, KSLFPG Charles de Gaulle International Airport, Paris FR — 4.79 kmSN68 Lil Bird Airport, Valley Center KS — 0.73 km787Consistent
OWENS-013SU-BTT2023-04-20Wilmington, DEUS-0656 McMaster Gliderport, Wichita KS — 7.84 kmKILG Wilmington Airport, Wilmington DE — 0.69 km637Consistent
OWENS-014SU-BND2023-05-03St. Louis, MOKCPS St Louis Downtown Airport, Cahokia/St Louis IL — 2.07 kmKCPS St Louis Downtown Airport, Cahokia/St Louis IL — 3.96 km460Consistent
OWENS-015SU-BND2023-05-09St. Louis then Goose Bay, MOKCPS St Louis Downtown Airport, Cahokia/St Louis IL — 4.38 kmCYLQ La Tuque Airport, La Tuque CA — 40.03 km542Consistent
OWENS-050SU-BND2023-05-12St. Louis, MOLFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 4.18 kmHE12 Inshas Air Base, Inshas EG — 19.8 km577INCONSISTENT
OWENS-020SU-BTT2024-02-09Omaha / Lincoln, NELFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 1.12 kmKLNK Lincoln Airport, Lincoln NE — 1.22 km1120Consistent
OWENS-021SU-BTT2024-02-14Wilmington, DEKLNK Lincoln Airport, Lincoln NE — 1.04 kmKILG Wilmington Airport, Wilmington DE — 0.82 km703Consistent
OWENS-023SU-BTT2024-03-29Wichita, KSLFPT Pontoise-Cormeilles Aerodrome, Val-d'Oise FR — 16.16 kmKICT Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, Wichita KS — 1.84 km877Consistent
OWENS-024, SITE-003SU-BTT2024-04-03Wichita / Lawrence, KSKICT Wichita Dwight D. Eisenhower National Airport, Wichita KS — 1.43 kmKILG Wilmington Airport, Wilmington DE — 1.15 km737Consistent
OWENS-025SU-BND2024-04-19Provo, UTLFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 6.67 kmKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 1.45 km1132Consistent
OWENS-026, SITE-004SU-BTT2024-04-23Provo, UTLFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 4.05 kmKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 1.42 km834Consistent
OWENS-027SU-BTT2024-04-28Wilmington, DEKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 1.41 kmKILG Wilmington Airport, Wilmington DE — 1.57 km1039Consistent
OWENS-035, OWENS-065SU-BND2025-05-23Provo, UTLFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 4.1 kmKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 1.42 km1451Consistent
OWENS-036SU-BTT2025-06-18Omaha / Lincoln, NEHEBA Alexandria International Airport, Alexandria EG — 36.13 kmHEAL El Alamein International Airport, El Alamein EG — 75.92 km9INCONSISTENT
OWENS-038, OWENS-067SU-BTT2025-07-20Omaha / Lincoln, NELFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 2.36 kmNE42 Dream Field, Lincoln NE — 5.74 km2404Consistent
OWENS-039SU-BTT2025-08-17Omaha / Lincoln, NELFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 2.16 kmNE42 Dream Field, Lincoln NE — 5.77 km1988Consistent
OWENS-040SU-BTT2025-09-04Provo, UTLFPB Paris-Le Bourget International Airport, Paris FR — 2.96 kmKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 1.35 km1971Consistent
EXTRA-006, SITE-006SU-BND2025-09-10Provo, UTKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 1.29 kmKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 1.3 km328Consistent
OWENS-041, SITE-005, SITE-006SU-BTT2025-09-10Provo then Wilmington, UT/DEKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 1.37 kmKILG Wilmington Airport, Wilmington DE — 1.75 km1789Consistent
OWENS-042SU-BND2025-09-13Provo, UTKPVU Provo Municipal Airport, Provo UT — 0.62 kmCA-0761 Nipigon Airport, Nipigon CA — 58.9 km1093Consistent

Read the distances. Fourteen of these twenty-three tracks end within two kilometres of a known airport — that is an aircraft on the field, not an aircraft in the general vicinity. In several the field is the one the spreadsheet names: SU-BTT into Wilmington at 1.63 km on 6 April 2023, into Provo at 1.42 km on 23 April 2024, into Lincoln at 1.22 km on 9 February 2024.

Read the shape of the routes too, because it is the same one over and over: Paris-Le Bourget to an American field, then American field to American field, then back east. Le Bourget is the first position in nine of the twenty-three. That is an ordinary long-range business-jet routing with a European fuel and customs stop, and it is what these traces mostly look like.

The recovered data corrects the spreadsheet in the auditor's favour​

Five of the twenty-three carry an inaccurate verdict in the spreadsheet's own audit column, and in three of those the audit's objection was to the route string, not to the aircraft being there at all. The recovered traces settle those three, and they settle them against the sheet and for the auditor:

RowThe sheet saysThe audit saidWhat the recovered track shows
OWENS-021 (2024-02-14)Omaha to Wilmington"flew from Lincoln to Wilmington, not Omaha"Starts KLNK Lincoln, 1.04 km. Ends KILG Wilmington, 0.82 km.
OWENS-025 (2024-04-19)route string disputed"4/19 Paris–Goose Bay–SLC–Provo. The arrival itself is real; the sheet's route string is wrong."Starts LFPB Paris-Le Bourget, 6.67 km. Ends KPVU Provo, 1.45 km.
OWENS-041 (2025-09-10)origin Paris / Lincoln"Sheet origin is wrong (Paris/Lincoln vs Provo)"Starts KPVU Provo, 1.37 km. Ends KILG Wilmington, 1.75 km.

This matters as a method result. Those audit corrections were made against paid data — a FlightRadar24 Business subscription and roughly 950 dollars of FlightAware logs. The free volunteer archives reproduce them independently, without an account and without a payment. Where the paid audit and the free archive can be compared, they agree.

10 September 2025, the one date that matters most​

Two rows in the table fall on the day of the assassination, and both are worth reading closely because the departure timing has been disputed three separate ways.

SU-BTT was heard on the Provo ramp from 13:07:53 UTC, and both archives record the same wheels-up at 13:14:03.82 UTC — agreeing with each other to the millisecond. Utah was on MDT (UTC−6) that day, so that is 07:14:03 a.m. local. The trace runs on to Wilmington, Delaware, last heard at 16:50:37 UTC. Charlie Kirk was shot at 12:23:30 p.m. MDT. The aircraft was airborne and eastbound five hours and nine minutes before the shot, and was already at Wilmington when it happened. That is the version the Provo page has carried as "07:14 am", and the primary record now supports it.

SU-BND never moved. Its first and last positions on 10 September are the same parking spot at Provo to five decimal places — 40.2298 N, 111.7277 W — across 328 position reports.

The Candace Owens broadcast of 17 November 2025 reported a transponder cycle on that airframe: on 09:05:36, off 10:34:05, on 12:40:53, off 13:29:40, with the time base not stated. Those four numbers are reproducible from the free archives, and both archives agree on all four boundaries independently:

Recovered (UTC)Read as UTC−7Utah local, MDT (UTC−6)As broadcast
First contact16:05:3509:05:3510:05:3509:05:36
Track goes quiet17:34:0910:34:0911:34:0910:34:05
Track returns19:40:5312:40:5313:40:5312:40:53
Last contact20:29:3813:29:3814:29:3813:29:40

The broadcast numbers match the recovered record to within four seconds on every boundary when they are read as UTC−7. Utah on 10 September 2025 was on UTC−6. Applying the correct offset moves every event one hour later: the transponder fell silent at 11:34 a.m. MDT — 49 minutes before the shot — and came back at 1:40 p.m. MDT, which is 77 minutes after the shot rather than the 17 minutes the broadcast described.

State plainly what that is and is not. It is a timezone reconciliation, drawn from two independent archives that agree to the second, and it is the same class of error the site has already had to correct once on the SU-BTT departure clock. It is not an accusation that anyone misled anybody — a one-hour offset on a UTC conversion is the commonest mistake in this entire subject. And a gap in a volunteer receiver network's coverage of a parked aircraft is exactly what a gap in a volunteer receiver network's coverage of a parked aircraft looks like. Ordinary explanations — the APU cycling, ground power, a single receiver going offline — come first. The aircraft's position is identical either side of the gap, so whatever happened, it did not move.

The two that do not check out​

Two of the twenty-three put the aircraft on the wrong continent.

SU-BND, 12 May 2023 — alleged St. Louis, Missouri​

The recovered track runs Paris-Le Bourget (4.18 km) to Inshas Air Base, Egypt (19.8 km) — 577 position reports, a full transatlantic-side leg from France into Egypt. On the date the spreadsheet places this aircraft in Missouri, the primary record has it flying from France to Egypt.

SU-BTT, 18 June 2025 — alleged Omaha / Lincoln, Nebraska​

The recovered track runs Alexandria International, Egypt (36.13 km) to El Alamein International, Egypt (75.92 km). On the date the spreadsheet places this aircraft in Nebraska, the primary record never has it leave Egypt.

This one is thin and must be labelled thin. It is nine position reports, the smallest trace in the entire set by a factor of fifty. Nine points is a fragment — enough to say a receiver in Egypt heard this airframe that day, not enough to reconstruct a flight. Both distances are large, which is what a fragment caught at altitude looks like. It is real primary data and it points one way, but a nine-point fragment should not be leaned on the way a 2,404-point trace can be.

What the spreadsheet's own audit already said about these two​

Both of them were already flagged. Neither is a new finding:

Rowaudit_verdictsurvives_auditThe counterargument column, already published
OWENS-050inaccurateno"Kanekoa audit against FlightRadar24 Business and 950 dollars of FlightAware logs places the aircraft in Egypt / on another continent on this date. Counted in the 73 anyway because it is on the Owens sheet. Auditor: Cairo."
OWENS-036inaccurateno"Kanekoa audit against FlightRadar24 Business and 950 dollars of FlightAware logs places the aircraft in Egypt / on another continent on this date. Counted in the 73 anyway because it is on the Owens sheet."

So the honest reading is narrow and it cuts both ways.

What it does mean: the free archives independently reproduce a paid audit's conclusion on both rows, from a completely different data source, at zero cost. Anyone can check it. That is a good result for the method.

What it does not mean: two wrong rows do not condemn a 73-row sheet. The sheet's own audit column had already marked both of them inaccurate and both as failing the audit, and they were counted in the 73 anyway because they appear on the source spreadsheet — a fact the site has published all along. The error was already disclosed by the people compiling it. Finding it again is confirmation, not exposure.

The thirty-nine with nothing in the window​

Thirty-nine of the sixty-nine pairs returned nothing from either archive on the alleged day or either side of it. That is not a finding about deletion, and nobody should read it as one.

The year-by-year breakdown, and it explains most of the shortfall on its own:

YearPairs testedTrack on the alleged dayShare
2022900% — untestable by construction
202323835%
202422732%
202515853%
Total692333%

The reasons, in order of how much they explain:

  1. Both free daily archives begin in 2023. Every one of the nine 2022 rows was untestable before a single request was sent. A 404 on a 2022 date carries no information at all. The only free route into 2022 is the ADS-B Exchange monthly sample archive, which holds one day per month — see the overview.
  2. These are volunteer receiver networks with real coverage holes. A foreign-registered jet over the North Atlantic, over the Sahara, or on approach to Cairo is outside the dense ground-station coverage that makes a US or European track look complete. Coverage over Egypt in particular is sparse, and both of the archives here depend on somebody having voluntarily put an antenna on a roof.
  3. The two archives are not the same network. adsb.lol and globe.airplanes.live are fed by different volunteers, which is why they were both asked. When neither has anything, two independent networks heard nothing — which is more informative than one silence, but is still silence.
  4. The aircraft may simply not have flown that day. A parked aeroplane with no power on the bus produces no ADS-B. Long stationary periods are documented for both of these airframes — SU-BND sat at Provo for 113 continuous days in 2025.
  5. The claimed date may be wrong. Seven of the misses turned out to be exactly that; they are the next section.

Concentrated by aircraft, the misses are 37 of SU-BTT's 53 pairs and 9 of SU-BND's 16 — and all nine of the 2022 rows are SU-BTT.

The seven that landed on the day next door​

Seven pairs had no track on the alleged day but did have one on an adjacent day:

Overlap IDAircraftAlleged dateTrack actually found onOffset
SITE-001SU-BTT2023-04-022023-04-01day before
OWENS-016SU-BND2023-06-122023-06-11day before
OWENS-052SU-BND2023-06-252023-06-24day before
OWENS-055SU-BTT2024-04-152024-04-16day after
OWENS-028SU-BTT2024-07-202024-07-21day after
OWENS-029SU-BTT2024-08-172024-08-18day after
OWENS-030SU-BND2024-12-082024-12-07day before

A one-day offset is often not a different flight. These archives are indexed by UTC date. An aircraft leaving an American field at 7 p.m. Central is airborne at 01:00 UTC the following day, so the same physical flight is filed under tomorrow. A transatlantic leg routinely spans two UTC dates outright.

But do not over-claim it. A one-day offset is also exactly what a genuinely wrong date in a spreadsheet looks like, and nothing in a date index can tell those two apart. These seven are neither confirmed nor refuted. They are counted separately from the 23 for that reason, and they are not added to the "consistent" tally. Each would need its own timestamp-by-timestamp check against the alleged event before it could be called anything.

What this changes, and what it does not​

It changes this​

  • Rows this site published as untestable now have primary data behind them. Twenty-three of the sixty-nine have a real ADS-B trace, from two independent archives, saved to disk in this repository with the source in the filename.
  • Twenty-one of the twenty-three corroborate the flight leg, and fourteen of the recovered tracks end within two kilometres of an airport. The legs are largely real.
  • On three rows the recovered data corrects the spreadsheet toward the auditor, including the 10 September origin. The free archives reproduced a paid audit's corrections at no cost.
  • The 10 September departure clock is settled by primary data: SU-BTT wheels-up 13:14:03 UTC, 07:14 a.m. MDT, five hours before the shot, with both archives agreeing to the millisecond.
  • Two rows are contradicted outright by the primary record, both of them already flagged inaccurate by the sheet's own audit.

It does not change this​

  • The overlap pairing is still unsourced. Every line above is about an aircraft. Whether a Kirk was in that city on that date is a separate question, and the recovered data says nothing about it.
  • Erika Kirk's itinerary is still absent, and no archive fixes it. There is no dated, published list of her locations for a backup to restore. The 73-overlap tally is measured against something this repository cannot reproduce.
  • The audit's central finding stands. The individual flight legs verify at a high rate while the overlaps built on top of them do not. That was true before this sweep and it is still true after it — this page is a large body of evidence for the first half of that sentence and none at all for the second.
  • Thirty-nine rows remain untested, nine of them permanently so at free-tier cost.
  • Presence is never purpose. Every aircraft here has ordinary explanations available — maintenance at the Duncan Aviation facilities these airframes repeatedly visit, diplomatic travel, routine positioning — and those explanations are documented elsewhere on this site alongside the claims.
  • None of this is in the criminal case. No flight record features in the prosecution of Tyler Robinson, who is charged and has not been convicted.

Reproduce this page​

Every number above comes from two scripts and no account, key or payment:

cd site/docs/Planes/following/apis/public_open_source/code/

# pull every (aircraft, date) pair in overlaps.csv from both free daily
# archives, on the alleged day and the UTC day either side
node recover_overlaps.js

# label each recovered track with its nearest airport and run the
# consistency test against the alleged place
node analyse_overlap_recovery.js

The outputs are overlap_recovery_index.json (the raw pull, including the neighbouring days and every HTTP status) and overlap_recovery_analysis.json (the nearest-airport labels and the verdicts), both under site/docs/Planes/following/apis/public_open_source/data/recovery/.

Every raw payload is saved under the aircraft's own directory at Planes/SU-BTT/data/recovered/ and Planes/SU-BND/data/recovered/, with the source in the filename, and each one has a .meta.json beside it recording the exact URL, the HTTP status, the byte count and the UTC retrieval time. Nothing overwrites a previous pull.

The claim being tested is in site/docs/Planes/following/overlaps.csv.