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← Getting The Data

Commercial Flight-Data APIs

We have not bought any of this yet. Every question below is open, and the page exists so that stays visible instead of quietly becoming "no comment".

The free sources answered a great deal — see the open-source pass — but they stop dead in two places that matter, and commercial vendors are the only way through both.

What the free pass cannot reach​

  1. 2022. The free historical archive we found does not go back that far. The earliest trace we obtained anywhere is 24 February 2023. The trackers date the whole pattern from 2022. Those rows are currently untestable at zero cost.
  2. The rows with no trace. 52 exactly-claimed dates returned nothing from the volunteer network. A commercial network with denser receiver coverage and satellite ADS-B may hold some of them — and a vendor with deep coverage also finding nothing is a considerably stronger negative than a volunteer network finding nothing.

What APIs they have​

Flightradar24 — the official API​

The vendor whose screenshots this entire claim was read off, which makes its own API the most direct way to check whether those screenshots were read correctly.

The endpoint that matters is flight summary — historic and near-real-time synopses of flights, queryable by registration and date range. It is the machine-readable form of the aircraft-history table people photographed. There are also historic flight-positions and full flight-track endpoints.

Bearer token, credit-metered, subscription.

FlightAware AeroAPI v4​

History back to 1 January 2011 — deep enough to cover the entire 2022 to 2025 window the trackers counted across. That makes it the single most valuable unopened door on this page.

GET /aircraft/{registration}/flights with a start and end is the call. Header is x-apikey. Results are cursor-paginated and every page is a separately billed query. Pricing is usage-based, advertised from around $0.002 per query.

ADS-B Exchange, via RapidAPI​

Once the unfiltered community feed — and this is the part that bears on the investigation. Several of the original claims were read off globe.adsbexchange.com history pages while they were open. Those pages now return HTTP 403 to the public (checked 24 August 2026). The data did not vanish; it moved behind a subscription. Anyone re-checking an old screenshot against that site today will find they cannot, and may reasonably but wrongly conclude something was removed.

Others worth knowing​

RadarBox (AirNav) runs an independent receiver network, which makes it a genuine cross-check rather than another view of the same feed. Cirium and OAG are scheduled-airline oriented and largely irrelevant to business jets. Spire sells satellite ADS-B, which is the only thing that would cover the mid-Atlantic legs nobody's ground receivers can see.

How you use them​

Clients are in apis/proprietary/code/ — fr24api.js, aeroapi.js, adsbexchange_rapidapi.js. None of them run without a credential, and that is deliberate. Each one exits with the reason, and the reason is meant to be copied into this page as a blocked-on-credential entry.

node fr24api.js SU-BTT 2025-09-01 2025-09-15
node aeroapi.js SU-BTT 2025-09-01 2025-09-15
node adsbexchange_rapidapi.js SU-BTT

Credentials never live in this repo. They are read at run time by public_open_source/code/lib/credentials.js, which looks in two places, in this order:

  1. the environment — export FR24_API_TOKEN=... still works and still wins;
  2. a credential file outside every git repo, ~/.credentials/charlie_kirk.json, mode 600, one key per vendor under charlie_kirk.flight_apis.

Never a file in this repo, never a commit, never a page, never printed. A reader repeating our pulls supplies their own credential the same way — that is the point of publishing the method rather than the key.

What their terms allow us to publish​

This is the constraint that shapes every page built from this pass.

Commercial terms generally let you use the data and state a conclusion. They do not let you mirror the feed. So the rule here is: publish the finding, not the payload. The raw response stays in apis/proprietary/data/ as our own audit trail, and the page says the response is held but not published, names the vendor, and gives the date of the query.

Where a licence is unclear, we treat it as restrictive.

Compare that with the government pass, where the data is public domain and mirroring it in full is the right thing to do. The pass a fact came from determines what may be done with it.

What we got so far​

Nothing. No commercial query has been run. No subscription is held for any vendor on this page.

That is stated plainly rather than left implied, because the honest position is that the deepest available flight history has not been consulted, and every conclusion on this site should be read knowing it.

What we did NOT get​

  • The 2022 rows. Blocked on an AeroAPI key. This is the cheapest, highest-value purchase available to this investigation and nothing else can substitute for it.
  • The 52 claimed dates with no free trace. Blocked on any commercial subscription.
  • Flightradar24's own record of the aircraft its screenshots were read off. Blocked on a token.
  • ADS-B Exchange historical. Behind a subscription since the site commercialised.
  • Blocking-programme status. We do not know whether any tracked tail appears on any vendor's suppression list. This matters more than it sounds: an aircraft suppressed from a commercial display looks exactly like an aircraft that never flew. Until each vendor is checked, a commercial "no result" cannot be read as an absence.
  • The terms themselves, read and quoted with a date. Summarised here from public documentation, not from a signed agreement.

The rule that governs this pass​

Run the free pass first, always. adsb.lol serves a free historical archive at the same URL shape ADS-B Exchange charges for. Never buy an answer that is already free, and never spend on a sweep when a named question would do — "did SU-BTT land at Wilmington on 10 September 2025, and when" is a question; "get everything about SU-BTT" is a bill.

And never work around a paywall. No scraping a vendor's site, no undocumented endpoints, no shared keys. A blocked question recorded honestly is worth more to this investigation than an answer obtained badly — because the answer obtained badly is the first thing a hostile reader will use to throw out everything else.