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Your faithful writer,
Dr. Daniel Smith

After her boyfriend Travis Kelce won the Super Bowl on Sunday night, Taylor Swift was very happy.

But there might be one thing lingering on her mind: her legal war against Florida college student Jack Sweeney.

Sweeney, who runs an account that tracks the location of Swift’s private jet, received a cease-and-desist letter from Swift’s lawyer in late December.

In the letter, Swift’s lawyer accused Sweeney of enabling Swift’s stalkers and giving “individuals intent on harming her, or with nefarious or violent intentions, a roadmap to carry out their plans.”

Sweeney responded by telling the Associated Press that:

What is Planespotting?

Planespotting refers to the practice of tracking the location of private jets based on publicly-available information.

Planespotting has become popular in recent years, with people like Sweeney helping to bring attention to the jet-setting lifestyles of uber-wealthy individuals like Swift, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk.

In 2023 Sweeney launched TheAirTraffic.com, which describes itself as a “global flight tracking website” that can be used to “easily track any aircraft!”

Plus: critics of private jets also argue that planespotting helps to make normal people aware of the massive environmental costs of private jets.

Sweeney v. Musk

It's easy enough for tech-savvy folks to piece together the publicly-available flight data needed to track private jets. Sweeney has operated more than 30 plane-tracking accounts, including one that tracked the whereabouts of Elon Musk.

Jack Sweeney first came into the public eye after his spat with Musk. After buying Twitter, Musk said that he would not ban Sweeney's @elonjet account because of his belief in free speech.

A month later, Musk banned the @elonjet account. Twitter (now X, under Musk) literally changed its terms of service to ban accounts like @elonjet that share live location data.

Musk also banned Sweeney's personal account and other planespotting bot accounts, including one that tracked Mark Zuckerberg’s private plane.

Should we ban private jets?

Growing awareness of planespotting comes as more people are starting to criticize private jet use for being:

• (a) environmentally wasteful

• (b) illustrative of the extreme economic inequality that characterizes the world today

Last year, ministers from France, Austria and the Netherlands tried to push the European Union to introduce restrictions on private jet usage.

In a letter, these ministers wrote:

Data shows that private jets can pollute up to 14x as much as commercial planes on a per-passenger basis.

Private jet use rose 64% in Europe from 2021 to 2022, as the world's wealthiest people are increasingly traveling on their own planes.

Who else wants to ban private jets?

• Nearly a quarter of a million people have signed a petition from the environmental group Greenpeace calling for a full ban on private jets.

• An airport in the Netherlands even decided to ban private flights starting in 2026 as a way of reducing carbon emissions.

• Left-wing economist Thomas Piketty, whose book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is one of the most popular books on economic inequality written in decades, advocated for a ban on private jets two years ago.

ART OF THE DAY

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Yours,
Dan