Military aircraft tracking, from public signals
A surprising amount of military and state aviation broadcasts ADS-B just like airliners. AeroScope surfaces those aircraft over your area and explains why each was flagged, using nothing but public broadcasts, ICAO hex allocations and observed behavior. It also respects the line where awareness ends and operational risk begins.
Three independent signals, cross-checked
ICAO hex ranges
Each country allocates blocks of 24-bit ICAO addresses, and many reserve sub-ranges for military airframes. An address inside a known military block is a strong first signal and a heavily weighted factor in the attention score.
Callsign patterns
Tactical callsigns (e.g. tanker, transport and reconnaissance prefixes) and well-known squadron schemes are matched against curated lists to corroborate the hex-range signal.
Pattern-of-life
Tanker tracks, racetrack orbits, slow surveillance loiters and grid searches are classified automatically, behavior that distinguishes a mission profile from an airline routing.
Because these three are independent, a confident identification needs more than one to agree, the same consensus philosophy AeroScope applies to anomaly detection.
Visible by choice, invisible by design
| Often visible on ADS-B | Usually not visible |
|---|---|
| Transport & tanker aircraft (training, logistics, AAR) | Combat aircraft on operational sorties (transponder off) |
| Many surveillance & ISR platforms in transit | Anything operating under emissions control (EMCON) |
| State / government VIP transports | Aircraft using non-broadcast military mode-5 only |
| Training flights in civil airspace | Most rotary special-operations activity |
Common reasons analysts track state aviation
OSINT & journalism
Corroborate open-source reporting on deployments, exercises and humanitarian airlifts with timestamped, exportable tracks.
Spotters & historians
Catch rare visitors over a base or airshow and keep a personal log of what passed overhead.
Airspace researchers
Study how military and civil traffic share airspace, and how integrity fields differ across fleets.
Patterns you will actually see
Most military activity visible on ADS-B is routine and repetitive. Recognising the common shapes stops ordinary training looking like something it is not.
| Pattern | What it usually is |
|---|---|
| Long racetrack orbit at high altitude | Air-to-air refuelling. A tanker holds a published track while receivers come and go. These orbits can persist for hours and are among the most commonly misread patterns. |
| Repeated circuits near an airfield | Training. Touch-and-go practice produces tight, regular loops at low altitude. |
| Steady point-to-point transit | Transport and logistics. Large cargo types moving between bases account for a great deal of what is overhead. |
| Slow loiter over a fixed area | Surveillance, survey or maritime patrol. Distinguished from an orbit by lower speed and a less regular ground track. |
| Helicopter operating low and locally | Training, transport or search and rescue, frequently shared between military and civil operators. |
Pattern classification is automatic and feeds the attention score, but the label describes geometry, not purpose.
What the data can and cannot tell you
ADS-B carries identity, position, altitude and velocity. Everything beyond that is inference, and the gap between the two is where most public misreadings happen.
Reasonably inferable: that an airframe is in a military ICAO allocation, that it is flying a recognisable pattern, that it is at a given altitude and speed, and often its type from registry data.
Not inferable: mission, tasking, cargo, crew, armament, intent, or whether a flight is connected to any event in the news. A tanker orbit looks identical whether it is supporting a training sortie or nothing of interest at all.
Identity itself is imperfect. Hex allocations can be reassigned, registry data goes stale, callsigns are sometimes generic or absent, and some operators deliberately mask identity. Treat a military flag as a strong indication, not a fact. See limitations.
Where awareness ends
This data is public because ADS-B was designed as an open safety system, and observing public broadcasts is legal. That does not make every use of it reasonable, and the distinction is worth stating plainly on a page like this one.
- Reasonable: understanding what is over your area, learning to read patterns, research into ADS-B data quality, journalism grounded in verifiable open data.
- Not reasonable: attempting to derive operational detail, correlating flights to infer sensitive activity, or anything intended to interfere with an aircraft or the people on it.
AeroScope surfaces what is already broadcast and explains why something was flagged. It deliberately does not attempt mission attribution, and the most sensitive flights routinely operate without ADS-B, so any picture built from this data is partial by construction.