Government Flight Records
This is the only pass that produces records instead of readings.
Everything on the rest of this site about where an aircraft was comes from somebody's radio receiver hearing a transponder. That is useful and it is checkable, but it is an observation. A landing-fee invoice, a fuel ticket, a customs entry, an airport badge log or a registry entry is a record — and on this site a record outranks every reading and every social-media post about the same flight.
It is also the slowest pass. A download takes a minute. A records request takes weeks, and some of them come back refused.
What downloads freely, right now, with no request at all
The FAA Releasable Aircraft Database
United States government work, public domain, no key, no account, refreshed daily.
https://registry.faa.gov/database/ReleasableAircraft.zip
Roughly 70 MB compressed. MASTER.txt is one row per registered airframe keyed on the N-number
without its leading N; ACFTREF.txt is the type reference. Because it is a government work it may
be republished in full, and this is the one pass where mirroring the data onto the site is the
right thing to do rather than a licence problem.
Pulled 24 August 2026 by apis/government/code/faa_registry.js. All ten N-registered tails this
investigation tracks were found. The extracted records are committed at
apis/government/data/faa_registry/tracked_tails_faa_master.json; the 70 MB archive is not, because
it is re-downloadable in a minute.
And immediately it contradicted the community databases
This is why the pass exists. For several tails, the registrant the FAA actually records is not the owner name circulating in the tracking threads. Both columns below were retrieved on the same day.
| Tail | FAA registrant of record | Community database (adsbdb.com) |
|---|---|---|
| N102DZ | ELDERBERRY CHESTNUT LLC — Cheyenne, WY | Aviation Enterprises Inc |
| N888KG | N888KG LLC — Lehi, UT | Fair Wind Air Charter |
| N582MM | DOJA CONTRACTING LLC — Mesa, AZ | Wildhorse LLC |
| N40JD | NUP AVIATION LLC — Princeton, IL | JDT Aviation LLC |
| N59906 | ALPHA WHISKEY 2 LLC — Brandon, MS | Marc Inc |
| N560TW | T W LEWIS-AVIATION LLC — Scottsdale, AZ | Pinnacle Aviation |
| N872RA | A&E HAWKER LP — Santa Ana, CA | Regency Air |
| N1098L | LASAI AVIATION II LLC — Manassas, VA | LASAI Aviation II LLC |
| N2100L | LASAI AVIATION II LLC — Manassas, VA | LASAI Aviation II LLC |
| N55906 | OPOLINER LARRY — Winter Park, FL | (individual) |
The counterargument, and it is a strong one: these are not necessarily errors. The FAA file is current registration; a community database may be carrying a former owner, an operator rather than an owner, or a management company rather than a registrant. Aircraft change hands. Both can have been true at different times.
But that is exactly the point. When a claim on X names the owner of an aircraft, it is very often quoting a community database, not the registry — and the two do not agree. Where this site names a registrant, it names the FAA one, and says the date it was retrieved.
Note also that a registrant is frequently a holding LLC. A holding company is not a person, and this site does not go behind one to name private individuals.
The hole in the middle of this pass
Every one of the five Egyptian tails at the centre of the following claim — SU-BTT, SU-BND, SU-BTU, SU-BTV, SU-BGM — appears in none of it. The FAA registry covers N-registered aircraft. Egypt publishes no equivalent public download.
So the best free government record available to us describes the aircraft nobody is arguing about, and is silent on the aircraft everybody is arguing about. That asymmetry is not a conspiracy — most national registries are not published — but it does mean the foreign side of this case cannot be resolved by a download. It can only be resolved by a request.
Airport and facility data
Federal airport and facility data, and the public-domain OurAirports dataset used in the open-source pass, supply runway lengths, elevation, ownership class and whether a field has scheduled service. These are the numbers behind the argument that a particular field is an odd place for a foreign government jet. Use the dataset, not an adjective.
What has to be requested — and from whom
Matching the question to the right custodian is where most records requests die.
| The question | Who actually holds it | Route |
|---|---|---|
| Who owns this airframe | Federal aviation registry | Free download, above |
| Air traffic handling, flight strips, radar | Federal air traffic agency | Federal FOIA |
| Customs processing of an international arrival | Federal border agency | Federal FOIA |
| Landing fees, fuel tickets, ramp assignment, hangar, badge access | The airport itself | State public-records law |
| Diplomatic clearance for a foreign state aircraft | Federal foreign-affairs department | Federal FOIA |
The fourth row is the one that matters most here and is the least used. Most of the fields in this case are city-owned or run by a public airport authority. That makes them subject to state public-records law, which is generally faster, cheaper and harder to stonewall than federal FOIA. The ramp records — who parked where, who bought fuel, who was issued a badge — sit with the airport, not with Washington.
There is a second point buried in the open-source data. US customs processing for the 2025 Provo-bound arrivals did not happen at Provo. The aircraft entered the United States at a northern field first and hopped to Utah afterwards. Every published claim about passengers, contractors and manifests has been aimed at Provo. The customs records are somewhere else, and as far as this repo can tell nobody has asked for them.
What we got so far
- 24 August 2026 — FAA Releasable Aircraft Database downloaded in full, HTTP 200, 73.1 MB.
Ten of ten tracked N-tails extracted with registrant, address, serial, Mode S hex, certificate
issue date and expiry. Saved to
apis/government/data/faa_registry/. - 24 August 2026 — FAA-recorded Mode S hex codes confirmed for all ten N-tails, and they agree with the hex codes the community databases give. The hex codes agree; the owner names do not.
- Airport reference facts for the fields named in this case are held in
Planes/following/airports.csvand are cross-checked against the public-domain dataset.
What we did NOT get
This is the work list, and it is the most useful section on this page.
- No Egyptian registry. No public download exists for SU- registrations. Owner, operator and airworthiness for the five tails at the centre of the claim are unverified from any primary registry, and everything published about them traces back to tracker readings.
- No records request has been filed yet by this project. Not one. The docket is empty. That is a gap in our work, not a refusal by anyone, and it is recorded here so it stops being invisible.
- No customs records for the northern-field entries, from any agency.
- No ramp, fuel, landing-fee or badge records from any of the airports in this case — including Provo, where a badge-access list is reported to have been updated the day after the assassination. That report is a claim on social media. A public-records request is how it stops being a claim.
- No diplomatic-clearance records for any foreign state aircraft movement in the window.
- No air traffic data — no strips, no radar, no recordings.
The rule this pass runs on
Ask for records, never for conclusions. Name the exact aircraft by registration and by ICAO hex, name the exact date range, name the record types, cite the free ADS-B trace as the reason the date is specific. A narrow request that gets answered beats a broad one refused as burdensome.
Never name a living private individual in a request. Ask about an aircraft and a date.
And when an agency misses its statutory deadline, the silence is a result and it gets published with the dates — as does any refusal, quoted with the exemption it cites.