The Warzone
originally reported that the new FAA reauthorization bill, which was introduced last June, will effectively make it impossible (or, at the very least, very, very hard) to track the jet activity of the well-to-do. The law will allow private aircraft owners to request that the government hide the personally identifying information associated with their planes. That’s a bummer, since in an age of
environmental concerns, it’s been helpful to know which members of America’s gilded class are spewing jet fuel into the atmosphere.
It’s not as if America’s rich and famous haven’t been lobbying for this to happen, either. Elon Musk famously
threatened to sue Jack Sweeney, an undergraduate at the University of Florida, after the student made a Twitter account that tracked the billionaire’s private jet activity, ElonJet, in 2020. After Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he
shadowbanned Sweeney before
fully banning him from the platform. Sweeney has since been allowed
back on X.
Taylor Swift, meanwhile, has been
dogged by complaints about her incessant air travel, also largely thanks to Sweeney’s flight monitoring efforts. Sweeney
recently compiled a video of Swift’s 2023 plane trips, the likes of which appeared to show that the pop star had flown 178,000 miles last year—roughly the equivalent of seven trips around the Earth. According to Sweeney, her jets emitted 1,200 tons of CO2, or 83 times the amount of the average American. A lawyer for Swift served Sweeney with a
cease-and-desist order in February.
gizmodo.com