track-planes-and-ships

track-planes-and-ships is an OSINT skill for tracing aircraft and vessels from public ADS-B and AIS broadcasts and linking them, through registries, toward ownership. Its central discipline is identifier hygiene: tail numbers, callsigns, vessel names, and MMSIs all change, while ICAO 24-bit hex codes and IMO numbers largely don't, so the skill teaches investigators to resolve to the durable identifier first via a triage table before anything downstream.

It explains how the underlying systems actually behave and where they mislead. ADS-B coverage is a map of where hobbyist receivers live, not where aircraft fly, so ocean and polar gaps are normal rather than findings; multilateration fills some Mode-S gaps but degrades at low altitude; and privacy programs (the FAA's Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed, temporary alternate ICAO addresses) plus differing aggregator blocking policies mean the same aircraft can appear on one network and be hidden on another. For vessels, it stresses that AIS transponders are crew-operated: static data (name, IMO, dimensions) is usually reliable, but voyage data (destination, ETA, draught) is hand-typed and frequently wrong or gamed. Ownership resolution runs through national and offshore registries, where the registered owner is typically a trust or single-purpose LLC — a handoff to further beneficial-ownership work. Reference files cover data sources and identifiers.

It targets sanctions-evasion and dark-fleet analysts, trade and supply-chain compliance teams, asset-tracing investigators, and journalists, and names ADS-B Exchange, Flightradar24, FlightAware, MarineTraffic, VesselFinder, and Equasis. Because it works over public broadcasts and public registries it is read-only, but tracing craft to owners and movement histories (including private jets) is dual-use and can enable tracking of individuals' assets and patterns.