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Celebrity Flights
- hexo 3y agoThis should be illegal.
- guitarsteve 3y agoThe flying or the tracking?
- number6 3y agoBoth, two birds with one stone
- hexo 3y agoThis kind of stalking.
- JumpinJack_Cash 3y agoTemporarily embarassed billionaire huh?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- graypegg 3y agoI hate to put it this way, but most flights are commercial passenger or freight. Only a small amount are private jets, so this really only affects a small number of people. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg would argue in favour of greater privacy for you? I think the effort of making flight data private (and all of the solutions we'd need to find for very important transponder/communications technology) is better spent on other privacy issues first.
- bee_rider 3y agoI think we’d have trouble banning it outright, but we could maybe give everyone a set amount of carbon credits per life (or maybe doled out on a yearly basis), and then the rich would at least have to buy pollution capacity from the poor? They are ruining everybody’s planet after all, not just their own.
- underdeserver 3y ago666 tons of CO2 for Zuckerberg. Coincidence?
- makapuf 3y agoI'm more appalled by a 30min, 1.2T co2 flight from him..
- reducesuffering 3y agoBezos has a 20 min. flight from Bellingham, WA to Seattle, WA. 90 miles, 1.5 hours in car...
- wds 3y agoYes!
- andreshb 3y agoOne of the flights is from New Jersey to Brooklyn … what a waste
- heartjudytenuta 3y agoClearly you have never dealt with traffic in the Holland Tunnel.
- kensai 3y agoIt would be equally important to make a graph of how much CO2 they offset by paying taxes, even if only theoretically.
- skilled 3y agoInteresting. Outside of that, do any of these people do any other activities that offset the damage they do with their private jets? Just wondering because this is such blatant clickbait material for an editorial, I won’t be surprised if an article about it is being written right now.
- 420official 3y agoOffsetting your damage doesn't change the fact that you are causing damage. What would be good is if these people stopped flying around the billionaire circuit on private jets _and_ paid their fair share of taxes but that's too much to ask these days. I do agree having a separate list of who pays the most in taxes relative to wealth/income would be interesting but also obviously less accurat.
- kensai 3y agoIn some airlines you can pay some extra to offset the damage you do according to the CO2 you produced on said distance.
- jonathankoren 3y agoWhat? That’s not what taxes are for.
- Pepe1vo 3y agoHow do taxes offset CO2? If anything they indirectly contribute to carbon emissions by way of fossil fuel subsidies.
- kortilla 3y agoFossil fuel is not subsidized with tax money. It’s subsidized with tax discounts. That’s happening regardless of tax income because the federal government doesn’t run a balanced budget.
- boeingUH60 3y agoI kinda find it creepy tracking people’s flights. Besides, some jet owners charter out their planes when not in use, so it’s incorrect to attribute all the miles to them.
- shadowgovt 3y agoI think there's a hard public interest in tracking flights. They're so safe these days that we can kind of forget that we're talking about moving multi-ton vehicles over people's homes, churches, and schools, where anything going wrong can result in significant loss of life and property damage... At the very least, I want to know who and when as a societal tradeoff for the privilege of using the air over our heads freely. (Also, that vested interest has been demonstrated in recent history. Keep in mind that it was ultimately plane-spotters who originally busted the extraordinary rendition policy of the US government open... They noticed planes had changed their regular flight patterns significantly).
- robocat 3y agoYour argument applies equally to cars. For a low price per car we could track all cars and also ensure they don't break a bunch of rules (say speed, acceleration, traffic lights) where drivers endanger others.
- shadowgovt 3y agoIt doesn't because cars stick to the road. The difference is a little hand wavy and path dependent on history, but pilots are required to file flight plans; nobody requires a drive plan. (Of course, every car has a license plate and if somebody were to establish an infrastructure for tracking all of those plates and correlating it to motion of vehicles... I'm actually not against that. I'm of the personal opinion that we are far too deferential to drivers and do not demand nearly enough responsibility from them, and the fatality rates on roads are demonstrative of this).
- bko 3y agoSome people say its based on public data but I think that its tapping into a network of moles to track celebrities. Really creepy stuff. > This confuses the issue though. ICAO numbers change if your aircraft is enrolled in the PIA program, which Elon is. Sweeny was bypassing this by using people on the ground to circumvent this by watching the jet's movement and if an aircraft was going to takeoff that had an unknown ICAO number he'd have someone at the airport to figure out it was Elon's jet that had changed it's ICAO number. > Your link will only be valid until he again changes his ICAO number. > More info: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/equipadsb/privacy [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33995566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33995566
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- high_priest 3y ago170 flights in a year averaging 200 minutes in air for... kim kardashian? What the heck does she need to fly for so far every other day?
- naniwaduni 3y agoThis is basically their version of commuting.
- cj 3y agoLooking at her flight log, my guess is the jet she owns is run by a company that rents it out to other people. If that’s not the case, I have no idea why anyone would fly from Atlanta to Savannah and then depart again 2 hours later. Must be rented out to others
- echelon 3y ago> Atlanta to Savannah and then depart again 2 hours later Savannah is such a hidden and unique gem, and truly one of the most beautiful cities in the country. It's not hard to imagine taking a quick meeting there. Lots of important people flow through the city. I'm hoping we get high speed rail on the Atlanta-Savannah corridor one day. The drive is a real slog and it's filled with deceptively unfair speed traps from podunk little towns using speeding tickets as their primary source of revenue.
- Ylpertnodi 3y agoI'll take a guess you got caught speeding.
- echelon 3y agoNot yet, knock on wood. But it's a super stressful drive.
- ajaimk 3y agoIs it a Gulfstream? Might be a maintenance run since Gulfstream's HQ is in Savannah.
- PUSH_AX 3y agoIs this tracking a specific jet associated with a person, or the person?
- cowsandmilk 3y agoTracking the jet owned by the person, which as others have pointed out, often is rented out for others to use (or they let friends, coworkers, etc take trips)
- nothrowaways 3y agoNever heard of Kylie Jenner, turns out she is an air pollutant.
- NewsaHackO 3y agoIt's annoying how people blatantly about things like this.
- averageRoyalty 3y agoI only found out who she was about 6 months ago - which a number of people didn't believe. Many people don't experience the same world as you, it's odd you think they do. I live in a western country, imagine a 65 year old tech nerd from Somalia on HN - how aware of American celebraties do you feel they'd be?
- hyperhopper 3y agoYou tried to act like you're above who you responded to, but you missed a verb.
- NewsaHackO 3y agoHuh?
- uoaei 3y agoYou accidentally a verb
- icpmacdo 3y agoPointing towards this to help reconcile some of the hypocrisy from celebrity messaging seems productive towards better discourse on climate change imo
- AlbertCory 3y ago"Oh, but it doesn't count when I do it."
- sublinear 3y agoWhat's missing here is a sense of scale. Routine private jet flights are nothing compared to last mile freight such as Amazon. Short frequent trips by delivery drivers from your local warehouse to your doorstep should not be so wasteful. The largest source of pollution is freight in general. Hating on individuals solves nothing at all.
- recursive 3y agoCelebrities probably order from Amazon too.
- fragmede 3y ago> I mean it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars? If you had people to do that for you, why would you do that yourself? You tell your personal assistant to get a new iphone for you, new drapes for the living room, whatever.
- recursive 3y agoIt doesn't matter who presses the button. It's still getting done.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago> Short frequent trips by delivery drivers from your local warehouse to your doorstep should not be so wasteful. Don’t they bundle these up so each trip serves as many people as possible? Also isn’t the alternative where the customer drives themselves to the store to pick up the same good just as bad if not possibly worse?
- mcbrienollie 3y agoSince 99.9% of the flights and the people are already registered, there should be a worldwide limitation per each of the person for CO2 emissions.
- seeknotfind 3y agoThe ability to restrict something doesn't imply it's ideal to restrict that thing. Some people should use more CO2, just like some people should go to space, or some people should be lawyer.
- fragmede 3y agoThere are heavy restrictions on the number of people you're allowed to kill.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mmcwilliams 3y agoI'm not sure they're totally equivalent because law degrees and jobs as astronauts aren't exactly zero-sum.
- mcbrienollie 3y agoThis can be adapted into different scenarios or use cases. At least it could be the first action into the CO2 emission problem that everybody is complaining about but nobody really does a thing. Well, also maybe we can let Kim Kardashian to have Zoom calls rather than taking flights.
- seeknotfind 3y agoYeah no problem with a limit, only with a per capita limit
- BrianHenryIE 3y agoSure, but it's important to put that in the context of the vast majority of the world's population who never fly, me who flies maybe three times a year, and people who flight weekly or more for the purpose of entertainment or a luxury lifestyle. Make it progressively more expensive to fly more miles to moderate the excesses; offer tax breaks where it is beneficial for the entire community.
- jmcgready 3y agoNote the disclaimer at the bottom of all the eyeball grabbing stats: Disclaimer: Data presented is not manually verified and its accuracy is not guaranteed.
- eniac111 3y agoI'm waiting for the data about their farts.
- bartkappenburg 3y agoWhere’s Richard Branson?
- lusus_naturae 3y agoIt would be helpful if something like might incentivize such celebs to create a fund for alternative fuel/energy research or commercial ventures.
- vuln 3y agoThey’ll beg the population to donate to their non-profit fund. See Hawaii as the latest example.
- southernplaces7 3y agoA recent flight by Zuckerberg consuming 1.4 tons of CO2 just to get from New Jersey to Jamaica Bay NYC while travelling multiple times the distance between the two if he'd taken a car in a more or less cross-line. His money, his choice on how to use it, but it's rather incredible coming from a guy who yammers on so much to the media about social responsibilities... Some things never change, and one of them is the way in which the elites take a tacitly "do as I say, not as I do" approach to their discourse.
- sjm-lbm 3y agoI doubt he was on board for that flight. Generally, flights like that one exist because the airplane is somewhere other than the most convenient place for the owner to take off from, so the crew repositions the plane in a better location for a more convenient pick up. I don't think that this really invalidates your overall conclusion or anything, just wanted to point that out.
- southernplaces7 3y agoFair enough, but as you say, doesn't change anything, possibly even makes it worse because that fuel was used entirely for his convenience just to move a plane closer, before he even hopped aboard for his flight.
- jrockway 3y agoCommercial airlines routinely move planes from JFK to LGA at night. There is a popular ATC recording of one not having the paperwork to fly IFR, so they want VFR instead. Mildly amusing twist on a common operation.
- toomanyrichies 3y agoIFR- "Instrument Flight Rules" VFR- "Visual Flight Rules" Source- https://atpflightschool.com/become-a-pilot/flight-training/vfr-ifr-flight-rules.html https://atpflightschool.com/become-a-pilot/flight-training/v...
- ivraatiems 3y agoI'm not sure about the accuracy of this data. It gives Taylor Swift's plane as N989TS, but N989TS is registered to a couple who live in Arizona: https://registry.faa.gov/AircraftInquiry/Search/NNumberResult?nNumberTxt=989TS https://registry.faa.gov/AircraftInquiry/Search/NNumberResul... and is a tiny single-prop aircraft. I don't think you could go cross-country in it.
- heartjudytenuta 3y agoWhat is the point of this? Why do people care? Do you expect these people to fly commercial like you and me? Hoping for that fateful day when you're sandwiched between Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos on a Ryanair flight, so you can give them your elevator speech with all three of your knees pressed up against your nostrils? Taylor Swift would be mobbed everywhere in the airport. Donald was a former president. The Secret Service doesn't let you drive a car after that, let alone fly commercial. Even if they wanted to; they can't. Many former presidents were car fanatics; Bush Jr. lamented to Jay Leno about not being able to drive his truck off private property anymore. 45 was known for sneaking past security detail in his pre-POTUS days to drive his Rolls around NYC. Not to mention Biden and his Corvettes, in his pre-dementia days anyway. This article is implying wrongdoing for situations can logically cannot exist.
- mrshadowgoose 3y agoI don't even think that these people need to "justify" their energy use. It seems that the vast majority of people have an innate need to hate on other groups of people. Not only that, but it seems that when presented with a cross-cutting societal problem (like carbon neutrality), "hating on others" seems to be a substitute for actually doing something intelligent about the problem. Our society is fundamentally based on energy use, and if we actually collectively cared about carbon-neutrality, we have an immense amount of potential clean energy available to us in the form of solar and nuclear. There's no need to play this silly hate game.
- lxgr 3y agoI wouldn't call it hate (or at least not all of it) – I would call it an understandable desire for some measure of fairness. I'd even say this has little to do with carbon emissions, and much to do with the price of economy tickets for many routes having doubled over the past months, and it'll likely only go up from here in the foreseeable future as we (hopefully) shift to synthetic aviation fuels. Taking a private flight for a very driveable distance, or a connection that has excellent and frequent first-class services available, just isn't the best look right now between sustained high inflation and the common narrative of individualizing the responsibility for carbon emissions. But yes, I agree that symbolic regulations and prohibitions without a viable alternative won't get us anywhere. Only setting effective regulatory incentives that properly account for the externalities of all forms of energy use will.
- 0xDEF 3y agoAccording to this Jeff Bezos took a flight from Seattle to Genova, Italy. I didn't know small private jets were capable of long haul flights like that without stopping.
- inemesitaffia 3y agoExtended range, external tanks
- wcarss 3y agoI wonder if we can see Mark Zuckerberg learning to fly here, or perhaps to skydive? A lot of recent flights that start in one city, fly to Tahoe, don't stop, but do a big turn around there, then go back home. Or which otherwise go way out of the way to do a short loop around Tahoe then land at a destination, and one a few months back that seemingly just circled there for a while. Or... maybe he's taking aerial photography -- always watching! /s
- xnx 3y agoHard for me to get worked up about this. If you're rich, you're going to spend the money on something. It barely matters if that's on a cross-country flight, a large house, multiple cars, or a boat. The environmental impact is very similar.
- somsak2 3y agoWould be nice to have some sort of benchmark, eg "average US consumer" etc. Looks like that value might be around 10~15.
- tamimio 3y agoCool tracker, I am sure if there is a tracker that tracks all billionaires’ resources consumptions, not just we will see how hypocrites they are, but also the ratio of that to average person will be abysmal, but of course, we have to use paper straws for the planet!
- andrewstuart 3y agoWhere > 1,000 it has alot more impact to say "megatons".
- DueDilligence 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]