Does the FAA’s New Move to Protect Aircraft Owners’ Private Information Move the Needle?
In short - while a step in the right direction - no, not until It becomes possible to prevent per-tail flight planning and tracking information from reaching the public.
(Washington, D.C.) On Friday, March 28th, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced that private aircraft owners and operators could begin electronically requesting that their aircraft registration information be withheld from public view via the Civil Aviation Registry Electronic Services (CARES), which will withhold said information from public display on all FAA websites.
Image of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) logo courtesy of the FAA.
Per the FAA’s message: “The FAA will publish a request for comment in the Federal Register to seek input on this measure, including whether removing the information would affect the ability of stakeholders to perform necessary functions, such as maintenance, safety checks, and regulatory compliance. The FAA is also evaluating whether to default to withholding the personally identifiable information of private aircraft owners and operators from the public aircraft registry and providing a means for owners and operators to download their data when needed.”
My take: while this is a good start – with respect to “electrictronicizing” said information – the current system will still be subject to the investigative work of plane spotters, ADS-B systems, etc. which will be able to spot aircraft on the ground and likely associate owners/Flyers with the aircraft in question.
Disclaimer: Any opinions expressed in this article are certainly not a function nor proclamation of expertise but rather what I believe to be common sense.
To clarify, ADS-B stands for “Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast), and describes a surveillance system that uses avionics, positioning sources and ground infrastructure to create a surveillance interface between aircraft and air traffic control (ATC).
What may be necessary in the future – in order to significantly minimize the security concerns of private aircraft owners – is a way to effectively provide the ability for owners to “blind” flight plans without requiring such phenomenon such as joining a fractional/group program in order to share the burden (and muck-up, to some degree) of public flight plans. Specifically, for sensitive flights, it may be wise for the FAA to implement a system whereby flight plans and in-flight tracking become completely “blind” from the view of the Jack Sweeneys of the world, rather than constantly associated with specific tail numbers, which are public on the ground and therefore “associate-able” in any case.
What would, in my opinion, do the trick, is a way to identify aircraft both “publicly” and “privately” – with both the traditional N- registration number and a private number which would not be painted on the aircraft in question (and would rather be hidden from public view). In sensitive scenarios, aircraft would be tracked by only their “private” numbers – which could be changed/rotated constantly in order to further protect privacy, unlike the static N-tail numbers which identify each aircraft.
