"Tracing Deportation Flights" with Gillian Brockell

You're listening to a stage tour titled Tracing Deportation Flites with Gillian Brackel. After running a continuous blog, publishing investigations at well-known news sites and maintaining a global tracker of these types of flights, Gillian felt like the right person to walk us through how to do this kind of open source work. This stage tour could best listen to whilst you explored the tools simultaneously. Gillian brought down the basic tools of her craft and provided some insight into her own experience reporting on this escalating issue. You can find links to all the resources mentioned in the talk in the podcast description. This tour was hosted by me. Charlotte Moore on Thursday, the 14th of May, 2026 in the Belling Hat Discord server. Hello all and welcome to another stage talk. This week we are joined by independent journalist Gillian Brackel, whose works sit at the intersection of open source intelligence, investigative journalism, aviation data and public accountability. A former flight attendant, Gillian has exposed that the US Coast Guard had done hundreds of ice flights on planes meant for search and rescue. Was the first to identify the aircraft carrying seven third-country nationals to South Sudan last May when it was still mid-flight. She helped to reveal the full extent of Kristi Knowham's aircraft buying spree that contributed to her being removed from the DHS, and uncovered ice's secret use of commercial flights to send Liam Ramos and other captured migrant children to the Dilly detention centre amongst many other stories. Over the last several years aircraft tracking has evolved from a niche hobby into a powerful reporting and research methodology, one which we've really trapped within this server. Publicly available aviation signals, registries and flight databases are now regularly used to investigate government operations, migration enforcement, military logistics, cooperativeity, sanctions evasion and crisis response. At the same time, flight tracking isn't something covered in Jensen training all familiar to the general public, so gaps in knowledge arise. Today we're hoping to close some of those gaps. Gillian will walk us through the fundamentals of aircraft, tracking the strengths and weaknesses of major flight tracking platforms, techniques for identifying government and ice associated flights, and the broad investigative toolkit surrounding aviation data. We will have time for audience questions, so you can place your questions in the chat accessible on the right hand corner of your screen, but please remember that this is being audio recorded for the podcast, so if you don't want me to mention your username, please add that as a note in your question. Okay, Gillian, let's hear more about your work. All right, thank you so much, Charlie. Hi everyone, I'm Gillian. I track and report on ice flights, as Charlie said, and I use a lot of flight tracking tools. I'll show you some of that with you today, and I know that there are a lot of avgiks in the Bellingkack community, so I just want to apologize in advance. I'm going to assume no aviation knowledge in my talk, and so if a lot of this is repetitive for you, I am sorry. So first, I'll talk about signal types, some basic terms and aircraft identifiers, how to use ADSB Exchange, how to identify an ice flight, and then I'll touch on some other tools for flight tracking in general and ice flights in particular. So there are several types of signals on different aircraft, but by far the most common is ADSB, which stands for automatic dependent surveillance broadcast. It's basically the replacement, a modern day replacement for radar, and it's a lot more accurate. So ADSB sends out information about itself, its identification, aircraft type, location, altitude, and speed, and the key thing about it is that it transmits this flight info to any receiver within range, other aircraft, air traffic control, satellites, and to aviation enthusiasts or avgiks who bought their own receivers and set them up in their homes, and that will become very important later in the talk. So in general, the whole aircraft are required to have ADSB on any time they're operating, there are some exceptions, but I'm not going to get into that, it won't really matter here. Military aircraft, most military aircraft are equipped with ADSB, but they often have it set in a mode where they're taking in everyone else's ADSB information, but they're not transmitting their own. However, they do use ADSB sometimes, and they also use other signals, other signal types that are detectable by most aircraft, most of the time. So usually, military aircraft only go completely dark and untrackable when they're in an active combat mission or if they are doing surveillance. And if you ever see a military plane on a flight tracking app and it has like a really squiggly line, that just means that it's being tracked by multilateration, which is not as accurate as ADSB, it doesn't mean the plane is actually squiggling around like that. Okay, so let's talk about some basic aircraft terms and identifiers. The first thing you might hear about is the registration number, which is also called a tail number or an end number. Those are all the same thing. This is basically the aircraft's license plate. It has to be visibly displayed on the back of every plane on both sides, and that's probably what you'll use, it's what I use most of the time when flight tracking. And like a license plate, the numbers can be totally random or custom. So you'll see some funny custom and numbers sometimes. And in the US, all non-military aircraft, their registration number starts with the letter N is in Nancy, that's where N number comes from. And in the UK, it's the letter G. Every country has their own, Kenya is 5Y, I have no idea why, but it is. And then US military registrations are generally numbers only know letters. And they usually, not always, start with two digits that correspond to the year they came into service, a dash, and then four digits. So 98 dash 234. A call sign is a unique identifier for a flight that is made up of letters and numbers. The call sign can just be the end number. A lot of private jets will just have the end number, be the call sign. But in commercial air travel, the letters are generally an abbreviation of the carrier's name, and the numbers are generally the flight number that are on your ticket. So JetBlue Flight 1690 from JFK to Austin is always going to have the call sign JFU 1690, regardless of the tail number on that particular day. This is also the idea that air traffic controllers use to communicate with pilots. So if you over here, ATC recordings, they'll be like, "Dribute 1690 blah blah blah blah blah blah." And yeah, so then I'm just going to talk about hacks and squawk numbers very briefly because I don't use them that much and they're not that useful for flight tracking. The hex code is essentially an international tail number for all aircraft military and civil. It's a little more complicated than that. It doesn't matter here. It always has six characters and they'll be the letters A through F and the digits C R through nine. And it's also sometimes called an ICAO number. ICAO is like the international FAA. It's like aviation governing body and they're the ones that give out the numbers. So that's why it's sometimes called ICAO. Squawk, all you need to know about the squawk is that squawking 7700 means the airplane is experiencing an emergency. Okay, so one more term and then I swear to God we'll look at the live now. That term is "LADD" it stands for "limited aircraft data displayed." In the US an aircraft owner can apply to the FAA for a lab designation and what that will do is hide the tail number and the call sign from flight tracking apps that get their data from government-owned ADSB receivers. So on flight radar 24 and flight aware you might see that there is a upstream sex flying over Austin but you won't see that the tail number is N6Q8TS which is one of Elon Musk's private jets. And it's generally used by rich people to hide their private jets from public view. That's the basic purpose. But this is really important for tracking ice flights because in April of last year the FAA gave lab designation to all ice charter airlines. So for activists, immigration attorneys, family members of immigrants in ice custody or just the general public who poke around on those apps, ice's air operation basically disappeared and that same month is when their activities really started to boom under the Trump administration. So without further ado let's look at the live map for a USB exchange and my share screen function is. working. So we're going to go to Charlie's screen. She unfortunately doesn't have ADSB exchange premium, so she's going to have pop up ads. If you want to pan out so we can see all of North America, that would be great. And that will just great. Fantastic. So we'll just take a minute for all of the flight data to come in. Beautiful. So this is a map of all of the aircraft that ADSB exchange receivers are getting right now. All right, so this is a collection of all the flight data from thousands of Afghiks all over the world who have set up their own receivers. And because they aren't getting the data from the government, a lot of designation does not matter. It means absolutely nothing. And so all of the information is collected and transmitted here. So if you're listening to this on the podcast, we are looking at a map of North America. And it is completely covered in airplane icons, mostly hot pink and purple. A bit of the colors too. And the colors correspond to altitude. So a plane on the ground is orange. Exhauffent and yellow as it's climbing, it's green, then blue, then purple is the cruising altitude for most planes. And you can see you can probably see that most of the hot pink icons are like smaller airplane icons. Those are private jets, private jets tend to cruise at 45,000 feet because it's faster up there. All right, so let's just look at some of the basic functions here. So in the upper right column, you'll see the search and then filters and columns. We're just going to look at search and filters. You can use the main search bar for most of the things you want to do on ADSB. So let's look for Elon Musk's plan. Just in the main search bar, you can put N628TS and we see another pop-up come up that shows the information for that aircraft. You might need to reload to get the screen to isolate. Okay, great. So we're not seeing anything, so that means it hasn't fallen in the last 24 hours. But what we can do in that column, you'll see the word history and you'll click that plus sign and you'll see the UTC day. The UTC is just universal time. Also called Zulu time, it's the same as Greenwich mean time. And so where it says previous, yeah, you can you can click a specific day like you're already doing fantastic. Or you can click previous, I think it flew yesterday and we see a flight come up. And then you'll also see there, you'll see all of the unique information for that aircraft. It's tail number, it's a type, type code, just means the type of plane that it is. And the call sign that it used, the last time that it flew. All right, very good. And yeah, so if you can X out of that, we'll get the full screen back. And now we'll use the main screen, the main search bar, again, to search a call sign. So a global X global crossing, also called global crossing is ice's main charter carrier. They always use the call sign gx a. So we'll just put gx a in the mean search bar. And it's going to bring up all of the planes that are in the air right now for global X. And if you scroll over one of the planes, great. So we'll see gx a 6108. So one thing that we flight trackers know from having tracked a lot of global X planes at all of their call signs that are ice flights of gx a then four digits and it starts at the six. So this is an ice flight. And then if you can go to the history and we can see at all of the planes that it has brought up, have been doing the last few days. And it looks like a lot of ice flights. All ice flights take off and return from the same city and ice airs main hub cities are Alexandria, Louisiana, which you have your cursor over right now. Harlingen, Texas, El Paso, and Mesa, Arizona. All right. So if you want to clear that search, I'm going to show you the more specific filters. So if you can click that filters tab. So all of this information you can ask for more specifically. So one of the pitfalls of the search bar, I did gx a it's going to show me anything that has gx a in any of its flight information. So it might show me a plane in like Brazil. It's just a little prop plane that has gx a and it's tail number. It's not, you know, so so if we do it by call sign here, we have the call sign option gx a then I'm just going to be getting a global X planes. Using the main search bar is going to be mostly right most of the time. And you can see you can do it by type. So say I heard about an ice flight that was going to Africa that was on a new carrier that they hadn't used before and I didn't know the end number. Well, I know that most ice flights to Africa are on Gulfstream 5s. So maybe I would put in GLF 5 and search. And that's going to show me all the Gulfstream 5s in the air right now. And that might help me to figure out which plane that was. And then if you scroll down, you can see you can look at I only want to see planes with the lab designation. I only want to see planes with a lab designation. I only want to see military aircraft. I only want to see aircraft that are registered in the United States or in any country. There, you know, specific boxes for all of those. And you can also do it by signal as you can see there's a DSP signal M-Lap mode S. You probably won't use those. Okay, so those are the basics. So how do you tell if an ice flight is an ice flight? Because remember these charter airlines, they do also have other clients. Not every global X flight is going to be an ice flight. And ice is also adding new charter partners all the time. I think they've added four of them this year. So first, all ice trips start and end in an ice detention hub city. Like I said, Alex Andrew and Louisiana is the main one. El Paso, Harlington, Texas, Mesa, Arizona. Air all out and back patterns. You can learn a lot about an aircraft and what it's being used for just by the patterns. And they're all going to go back the way they came. They generally only stop somewhere for about two hours. And when they have to do a fuel stop or layover for crew rest, if they're doing like an Africa or Asia deportation, they tend to use the same cities over and over. And then like I said, most of these airlines also have call sign conventions for their ice flights. So global X has GXA for digits. And they'll start with the number six. If an ice flight isn't meeting all of these or if a flight isn't meeting all of these criteria, then I'm not going to say it's an ice flight. So there could be ice flights that aren't meeting these criteria. But you know, for reporting purposes, you want to, you know, are on the side of caution. They're generally about 50 ice flights a day. And then the last button I want to show you, if you see those blue icons that are by themselves next to a black info column, the bottom button that's a triangle with a circle on it, if you click on that, this is going to be how you look at a certain area over time. So if you want to zoom in on central Louisiana, we'll get Alexandria up here. So you can see on this bottom bar that came up, we have date, and then we have UTC time and we have speed. So say I wanted to look on a certain day, I used this button for my postcard reporting because I didn't have the tail numbers, but a source that I use a lot named JJNDC who's in the chat. He was like, I think these Coast Guard planes that are supposed to be for search and rescue are being used for ice flights. They're following ice flight patterns. Search and rescue flight patterns are very different. You know, they go out over the water, they go around the circle, and then they go back to the same city. But now they were doing ice flight patterns. So I didn't have the tail numbers for those. So the way that I Atos was going to. down to Alexandria and looking over time to spot the planes coming up. And you can speed it up if you want to make it a little faster. But I will say ADSB Exchange uses a lot of memory on your computer. And the more filters you put on, the more memory it's going to use. Even if you're only looking at one plane, if you're using a lot of filters, it could make your computer crash if you don't have a lot of memory. And there are also usually pop-up ads, although there aren't right now, which is amazing. There are pop-up ads unless you have premium and they can drive you insane pretty quickly. So get premium. Okay. Yeah. So, say you want to track a plane that is going into one of the areas that ADSB average is not very good with. So if you want to scroll back out at all of North America or even the whole world, we'll just wait for all the flight data to come in in Kichun. All right. So you'll see there are some gaps. There's basically nothing over the Amazon. There's nothing over the Pacific. That doesn't mean that there are no planes flying there. It just means that there are no ADSB member receivers there. Right? There are some Amazon who is an ADSB exchange member. So this is something that I use a lot when I'm tracking flights in Africa. You can see that ADSB coverage in Africa is not very good. So this is where flight radar 24 actually comes in really handy. This function only works on the gold version. So you have to pay for it. Because they're using satellite, they can tell you exactly where planes are landing, but they won't give you the ID. So you just train you late. You know, you say it's usually like off the coast of Senegal. Well, off the coast of Senegal, I can see that on ADSB exchange, N588AT, which is a plane that I track a lot, is about to land in Dakar. Okay, so now I, and it's at, you know, UTC 1624. Okay, great. Now I go over to flight radar 24 and I go, a Gulf Stream 5 is flying in the exact same position at 1624. That's the plane. Now I can track it as it flies and makes it stop all through Africa. Okay, so now you may be wondering, how do I find tail numbers for all the planes in the charter airline fleets or any other planes that you want to track? There are a couple ways. First, some of them put all of their fleet numbers on their company website. Journey aviation does that. Next, you can try planesbotters.net. It's like a Wikipedia for airplane pictures. One of the, there are like different flavors of Avgik. Some people are flight tracking enthusiasts. Some people really like taking photos of different airplanes. Some people are like aviation or like experiential Avgik. So like, oh, the Embrero 190 is doing its last flight in the United States. I have to be on it, you know, that's a different kind. So the, but the plane spotters folks, they have, they shared all their photos here. And most of the time they have pretty good fleet lists. So if you want to put in in the search bar, if you want to put in N279GX, say I spotted a global X plane, that's one of them, I can search it. And then you will scroll down to the bottom and where it says global X, you can click where it says global X and scroll down and it's, they give you an entire fleet list. Fleet list, current fleet list to historic fleet list. And these are generally pretty accurate, you know, like Wikipedia, it's mostly right. It's not always right. It's not an official source. So I wouldn't use it as my only source for reporting. And it's mostly right. Another thing that you can do is that the FAA also publishes part 135 fleet list. So every charter carrier and the list of all of the tail numbers in their fleet. They will say that they're supposed to publish that once a month and they haven't been doing that in Trump too. I think the last time that they published it was in February and it wasn't very accurate. It's that one seems to be old. So that is not perfect either. Okay. And then another thing is the FAA registry. That's going to be that's just a searchable website that the FAA has to get information number to get information on the every tail number in civil aviation. That can be really useful. That will tell you the aircraft's owners, which often do not correspond to the charter airline that's flying them, but can be a rich source of information. So other resources you can use for flight tracking in general live atc.net has air traffic control recordings and there is an archive function, but it only goes back 24 hours. So you've got to get there fast. I only use this if I suspect a flight has had some type of emergency and I'd like to try to hear more about what is going on. So last November, I got a tip that in a fellow ice flight had a cabin depressurization and I was able to get the ATC recording to confirm that and to report that there were six people who were injured. And then the last thing I'll say is a cars. I'm just going to touch on that a little bit. A cars are like text messages that the flight deck and the ground can send to one another and they come up on a little printout. There is a website, it's sbg.airframes.io where you can search a cars. Is it TBG or SBG did? Jo, did I get that wrong? TBG works. Okay, great. Thank you. Bg.airframes.io. Thank you, Jay. And I'll just say that for a cars, you have to search a cars by hex. So you will need the hex numbers for that. So I don't use a cars much, but I did use it for a story I did for Rolling Stone. Last fall about a military ice flight. The military doesn't do many flights for ice, but they have done some. And this particular flight they had gone completely dark. They weren't transmitting any signals at all and became undetectable, but they did send some a cars and the a cars said what cities they were landing in. So I was still able to report where that plane landed in West Africa. Okay, so some tools for learning more about ice flights. So first, there's this amazing new tool called Habiest Flight Watch. This is the Habiest Flight Watch dashboard. This is the work of JJ and DC and some activists in New England called Lexington Alarm and they have really good coding skills. So JJ tracks flights every day. You'll see him posting on Blue Sky about them a lot. And he has gotten to a point where he can see their schedules and predict their movements. And he was putting this on Blue Sky and he is also constantly getting messages from attorneys and activists and journalists saying, "Hey, is there going to be an ice flight to this city today?" And so they basically built this dashboard with the predicted schedule in it. So it automatically updates once the actual flight data comes up and the flight starts. And so one of the things that we've seen with combating ice and is that Habiest Petitions are like one of the most important tools. So when ice capture someone, they want to fly them down to one of the detention centers in the south as fast as they can. The federal courts there are going to rule in ice's favor much more. And most of the time the immigrants will have to get a new lawyer. Now they have to get a new lawyer while in prison in an area that they're not familiar with. And so it just becomes much more difficult to fight your case. So you want to get a Habiest Petition filed before they get taken. So I know a lot of immigration attorneys are really overwhelmed right now. So this is a tool. So if you live in Boston and you find out that one of your clients has been captured, you can look at the, it's going to be the hands gum one bed. Yes, sorry, Bedford. It's the BED. And you can say, okay, there are no ice slide schedule today. I can hold on a second till I have a minute until I get this petition in. And if let's say you're in Richmond and then quick on the red one that says RIC, there's one coming on the way right now. And so I need to get the petition and immediately. And then if you score down to the bottom. of this thing where it says record. So another thing that's really important is that if the plane is already in the air with your client on it, they're still in your jurisdiction until the plane lands in Alexandria or wherever they're going. This produces a flight record that you can put in the filing to say they were still in the air, they're in our jurisdiction and then ICE has to bring them back. So it was started mostly to help immigration attorneys. I think they've been beta testing it so they haven't been super public with it but they are now. So share this far and wide with everyone you know. And then I know activists and journalists have been using it a lot too. So if you want to organize an ICE flight watch in your city where you are watching how many people are being taken onto the flight, that's something that you can really, you can use this tool to help with that. And then yeah, so then also a lot of you know or know of Tom Cartwright. He is just an amazing flight tracker. He's a retired J. King work executive who just got really involved in advocacy for my grandson starting in 2020. He started producing these monthly reports of every ICE flight that he had tracked that month. And you know, ICE doesn't have any public records that they're sharing. So this is basically you know, the only records that we have of ICE's activities, ICE's flights going back to 2020. And then last summer, he retired, retired and handed that his operation over to human rights first. So human rights first produces really great reports, monthly reports, full of information, that if you're just getting started tracking ICE flights, I really encourage you to like pour over those reports and you can learn a lot. And then the last thing I will say is my website, alienbrackel.com if you scroll down a little bit and you'll see the map with the green countries. This is my third country removal tracker. So I'm tracking every known third country removal that ICE has done. These are that they're not really deportations, but these are when they send someone a migrant to a country that they have no ties to. And those are happening under a lot of different circumstances. You know, the best case scenario is Costa Rica where they're actually being offered resettlement in Costa Rica, most of the time that isn't happening. Most of the time, these countries are just forcing people to return back to their countries of Oregon, which is called Pane Reffalement. It's a human rights violation. It's against US and international law, but we are still doing a lot of them, at least 14,000 of them so far in Trump too. And then the sort of worst case scenario is East Ritini, formerly known as Swazinland, where they're just holding them in a maximum security prison indefinitely. And yeah, if you're an activist, a researcher in immigration attorney or an independent journalist, you are more than welcome to contact me at any time. If you ever have any questions about a flight or if you're afraid a client is about to be deported, et cetera. I'm on Blue Sky and my signal is the brockpl.44. And with that, I'll take your questions. I hope that was helpful. - Thank you and apologies about my navigation skills as you were trying to point me towards. Oh, you said great, it's like real teaching. No, it's, thank you so much for taking us through all of that. And obviously I know some people within here are familiar with some of those tools, but it's always useful to have a little refresher. Again, if you like this subject, we do have channels within here to talk about that subject and practice the skills of just been described. Aviation is one of them. And then we also have one that looks particularly at US immigration and customs enforcement actions named as such. Daniel Kim said, "If your local area doesn't have robust monitoring activities like the folks in Minnesota, is there a way to figure out how many people were in deportation planes any given day? And if so, what would that process look like in determining an estimated number?" So how do you estimate how many people are likely to be on the planes themselves? Is that possible? Is there, isn't robust monitoring activities in that area? - No, it's not possible unless there's someone actually watching it. It's not, you can estimate. So, you know, that been 37 has about 150 and 160 seats and at every ice flight, there are a ton of guards. So they'll generally have anywhere between 10 and 40 contract security guards and ice agents on each flight. So yeah, so the max would be 110, 120, on a 737, but it can, you know, I've seen eight. So it really runs the gamut. Now I will say in Seattle, Seattle's really interesting Boeing field, the county is King County that Seattle is in and the Boeing field airport ice was using that for years and the King County executive kicked him out. Said, "We don't want you doing this here." It was a whole court case and then the courts ruled that you can't kick the federal government out of a public use airport and that includes their contactors. So the King County executive said, "Fine, if you're gonna do ice flights here, then they have to be on camera." So there's a live stream that you can watch of every single ice flight loading in at Boeing field and it's really useful to sort of see what they're like, to see the way that, you know, everyone is shackled, to see the way that they treat people in wheelchairs. It hopefully prevents some of the worst of uses knowing that they have a camera on them, although there are videos where you can see them abusing migrants even in Seattle. You know, one thing that I would say is that, you know, find out who owns who governs the airport in your city that is taking ice flights and then, you know, start insisting that a camera be set up. If you don't have a big network of activists who can be there, you watch them with your own eyes or if they're in an area that isn't public, easily they are and you, they will know where they were to watch them too, where you can watch them from a public place. But yeah, I mean, I think getting live streams, especially in blue cities and blue states for all of these is extremely important. I love the uptick on live streams at the moment. It's really useful for a number of different investigations. So I know actually asked to follow up on that. Is it possible to count retroactively? For example, I want to figure out how many detained people flew out of the airport to Sumiano, which airports were used starting from June the 6th, 2025 to today. Have you ever had to do that retroactively? Yeah, I mean, I've done that for my own airport, BWI Baltimore, I've lived nearest to that airport. I've witnessed probably five, but I went back using, I mean, it took forever, but I did go back to January 20th, 2025 and checked the tail numbers for every ice aircraft that I'm aware of and made a spreadsheet of every single one that has landed at BWI. And so, you know, it was basically like four or five of them until the last August I would say is when they started doing twice a week. And then there have been, you know, surges and drop-offs. But yeah, you can go back. And on flight radar 24 premium, you can only go back to one year. And then ADSB Exchange goes back to 2020. I have to say, Jodie has been dropping some amazing resources in the chat. I will make sure that they are all mentioned in the description of the podcast, including that Seattle live stream that they've just now linked to. Thank you so much for that. We've been talking about the ease and the, well, I've demonstrated how a layman can use some of these tools. But how much of your research balances on your knowledge and experience as a flight attendant are there things from that previous job that have helped you better understand potential violations in these cases? Yeah, I mean, that's mostly got to do with the federal aviation regulations that are being violated on every single ice flight. Because they're all shackled, you know, every flight attendant, the your main obsession is keeping the aisle clear and your passengers unencumbered so that if they have to evacuate an emergency, they can do so. within 90 seconds. So if everyone on board is shackled at the ankles, that can't happen. We know that there have been, we know of five emergency evacuations that have happened on ice flights, which we believe it was 2014 and 2021 because of some court filings and some discovery. And we only know the evacuation times for two of those. One of those was two and a half minutes. The other was seven and a half minutes. There was also another emergency where they didn't evacuate in the accident. They absolutely should have. The cabin filled up with smoke and everyone on that plane could have been killed. It's lucky that they weren't. So yeah, I mean the thing that really motivates me with this reporting is like how angry I am as a former flight attendant that like these people are not able to respond to an emergency and care for themselves. You know, from talking to ice, they're flight attendants. I know that they're they're being told if you have to evacuate, just save yourself and let these people die. They're not being told how to evacuate shackled people. And I know from the, you know, the Avalo Depresurization, the six people that were injured, I don't know if those were passengers guards or crew members. But I do know that they were injuries to their sinuses. And if you're shackled with a waste chain, you can't reach for your oxygen ask. So, you know, these sinus injuries aren't serious, but they're very painful. And it could have those could have been caused because they couldn't reach their oxygen asks. Yeah, so I mean, I also have just sort of a general sense of like when a crew is going to time out. And so, you know, they're going to be, they're going to be switching crews and going to layover cities. And, you know, I had a sense of that. And then talking to some of these ice air flight attendants later, it's like, yeah, that is where the crew is going. I hope that's, I hope that answered the question. Yeah. And it's really useful to understand the patterns as well of where about these fights are taking place. Just being able to kind of watch central airports and call signs, as you mentioned, is really, really useful knowledge just to have in terms of research. Have there been attempts by the government or airlines to try and obscure some of the data that you're trying to use to track them now that they know that there's groups actively monitoring this or is that against legal rules? Like, is there ways that they can obscure the data that you're trying to access? And has that happened? Have you seen that go up in terms of recent development? There are ways I, they are rarely used. You wouldn't want to use it a lot. You wouldn't want to use it for all ice flights just because that would risk all of aviation safety and, you know, the pilot's just wouldn't let that happen. I mean, I do know that, you know, there was the flight I talked about earlier. One military ice flight had its signals turned completely off. Others have changed into modes that are, you know, a little hard to track. There have been incidents that I haven't fully reported out where they're using alternative hex codes. That's only happened once that I'm aware of and that could have been because of a malfunction just as easily as trying to obscure. And I was still able to figure out where that plane landed through other methods. And so I wouldn't say that they're, you know, doing that globally. One thing that I am very concerned about is, you know, you may have read that ice is buying its own planes because they want to do their own removal flights instead of relying on charters. And, you know, I have the N numbers for all of those planes. And in general, like government planes, you know, the FBI jet or whatever, like it's still a civil aircraft. It's not military. They're not supposed to be turning off their signals. But at the end of the day, like government can kind of do what it wants to. So I do worry that they're trying to buy these planes because they want to go dark. It hasn't happened yet. But yes, I do worry about that. Soans just asked, has anyone gone after ice charters, a pilot's doing foreign country removals at the International Criminal Court, especially any foreign national pilots? No, but I would love it if they did. I do want to say one thing. Ireland, you know, people are very organized in Ireland. And, you know, there's a thing called Shannon Watch that has been tracking military aircraft that land at Shannon for years. And they're great. I mean, they're able to determine if a plane had, you know, weapons on it that are going to Israel. They have a list of all of the rendition flights during the global war on terror that refueled at Shannon. And ice fights do occasionally. I have track to think eight of them that have landed at Shannon. And they'll be there. They'll be watching. They are trying to get their laws enforced there and get police to search the planes there and enforce human rights regulations there. So they call the cops every time an ice flight lands there. So far, they haven't been successful, but they are trying. Thanks for that additional information. Yes, it's amazing to hear that there are communities out there trying to prevent this. As I was just saying, there's a couple more resources that have been mentioned in the chat as well. Lemon, Lemonador said the new app from ATC.com, aka enhanced radar supports a degree of search that lets you find ATC broadcasts where that calls sign is mentioned across frequencies. They have much less coverage than live ADC. We talked earlier about the need for historical data and belling cap built turn stone, which is a aggregator for ADSB data for multiple aircraft over time. So you can search your flights across two areas of interest at once and across time. It's possible to interrogate the baseline level of movement and spot unusual patterns using that. So I make sure to drop that in the description of the podcast and in the chat in a second as well. Because there's so many people trying flight tracking for the first time, and particularly with a deportation flights front to mind, is there any concerns of people misunderstanding data on these sites? Have you seen any cases where that's happened where misinformation has been spread because people have misunderstood the data that they found on these sites? Yeah, I don't know about misinformation, but a hobbyist did contact me, saying recently saying, I think I found something. I think Delta is doing deportation flights. I think American is doing deportation flights. Look, they are going out of this city and they're going to this place. One of the things that I know from just watching planes over a long time is that there's a repair facility at this city in Mexico. So he thought that that was a deportation flight. And I was saying, no, no, no, that plane's going to get repaired. And you can tell by the call signs. They ferried there. So they were using Americans, fairy flight call signs. And then it was there for two weeks, which a plane wouldn't be there for two weeks. If it was a deportation, it would go right back. So that plane was broken and was getting fixed. In terms of misinformation spreading, I don't think any flight data was used for this, but there is a rumor. And I have this in my ICER FAQ on my website. There is a rumor that went around, especially last summer, that they're throwing people out of planes. And this is there's no evidence of that. And I'm not putting, I'm not saying that's not happening because I think ice would never do that. I think they would. But it's just not possible. So first of all, they would have to be on a military plane. Charter planes can't open their doors mid-flight. It's like physically not possible. And the rumor was like, look, these five bodies washed up in Italy. And like that's actually about the migrants that go from North Africa to Europe on boats. And they get killed by smokeware, and thrown overboard. Like that, you know, had nothing to do with American military or American migrants. There's just, there's no flight data at all to support that this would be happening. And so, like I said, I don't put anything past ice, but that rumor is completely untrue. It started on TikTok, with someone who has no aviation experience at all. The best rumours. start on TikTok. I have a great essay. Unfortunately, yeah, there's still quite a lot of useful things in the chat, which I'll make sure to think, including the link to your websites, which will be in the description of this podcast. Before we go, I just wanted to quickly recap in terms of identifying an ice associated fight or a deportation flight. What constitutes sufficient evidence for you? What are you looking for specifically in terms of key pointers for these flights? For those who want to go away after this and maybe start digging into these types of flights? The chips are all going to start in and in an ice flight hub city. That is going to be Mesa, Arizona. I'll pass out Harlingen, Texas. The main one is Alexandria, Louisiana. I think there are a couple going out of Jacksonville, yeah. They're all going to be going in and out of a hub city. They are all going to have commonalities in the call signs. Then the flight patterns are generally out and back. They don't have long layovers in any of the cities that they land in, generally about two hours. Then you can always check with me or with JJ or Nick Benson, whose ottergoose.net on Blue Sky, whose an amazing flight tracker out of Minnesota. A good way to get started, I think, would just be to watch all of the planes that leave out of Alexandria, Louisiana in a day using the archive button on ADSB Exchange. Then when a plane takes off, just look at it. It'll go, "Oh, this is Eastern Airlines. Are they an ice flight provider?" Yes, they are. "Oh, this is Delta. This is just a Delta flight." It's a global X, Eastern Airlines, Eastern Air Express, Keyline Air, Air Wisconsin. Big corn airways was doing things for a while, although I think they might have stopped. CSI aviation, journey aviation, palan air, and sometimes the military. But the Coast Guard stopped about a month and a half ago. Super useful. As someone's put in the chat, you can also help help by building a buying an ADSB feeder as well and provide that flight tracking data for ADSB Exchange and fly to air and other platforms. As mentioned, I know a couple of people in the server have such devices and they are super super useful for open source reporting and flight tracking. So please do also consider that. Unfortunately, we're at time and I don't want to dig because I would love to keep discussing this topic forever. If you're like me and you want to continue the conversation, you can do in hashtag aviation or in hashtag ice. Both of those channels are appropriate for conversation on this topic. But for now, Gileena has to say goodbye. How can people reach out to you if they want to continue this talk? Perhaps have a question for you that's not suitable for discord. Yeah, so I'm Blue Sky. I'm Gileena Bride. Brackel.com and my signal is gbrackel.44. If you want to send me proton, it's [email protected]. Amazing. I'll make sure to include those in the podcast description as well. Thank you so much, everybody for listening. Apologies about the tech issues at the beginning of the talk. Thank you for sticking by us and into each time we'll be back with another stage talk. All right, thank you, everybody. Thank you for listening to the stage talk. If you've liked to catch a stage talk live where you can ask the guest questions, join the bell and cat discord server by visiting www.discord.gg/bellingcat. The music you've heard is titled "Dawn" by Newer Self and is courtesy of ArtList.