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 behaviour. It also respects the line where awareness ends and operational risk begins.
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.
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.
Tanker tracks, racetrack orbits, slow surveillance loiters and grid searches are classified automatically — behaviour 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.
| 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 |
Corroborate open-source reporting on deployments, exercises and humanitarian airlifts with timestamped, exportable tracks.
Catch rare visitors over a base or airshow and keep a personal log of what passed overhead.
Study how military and civil traffic share airspace, and how integrity fields differ across fleets.