ADS-B tells us a plane flew a route. Public records tell us whose plane it was, who paid, and sometimes who was aboard and why. Those records are a patchwork: some states hand them over, some shield them entirely. The most valuable flights are the ones where a record and a flight track agree.
Records some states simply publish
A few state aviation agencies post flight records on their own websites, no request needed. South Carolina’s Division of Aeronautics publishes manifests that name passengers and a trip purpose, including logged recruiting travel for the state’s public university; it is the template we wish every state followed. Nebraska’s Department of Transportation, Pennsylvania’s PennDOT, and West Virginia’s state fleet publish usage logs with names and purposes as well. These are the cleanest records we work with, because the agency has already done the disclosure.
Records you have to request
Most university and charter travel comes through Freedom of Information Act and state open-records requests, and the quality varies widely:
- Some schools keep a per-trip purpose field that distinguishes recruiting from personal travel, so the record itself says what a flight was for.
- Some charter records are fully public: one program’s flight department has hundreds of trips, with named passengers and written justifications, released and posted in full.
- Others arrive heavily redacted, or only as accounting postings (a dollar amount and a program code with no destination) that we can only bracket against the flight track.
The FAA registry, and what changed
The FAA Aircraft Registry maps a tail number to its registered owner, and is the starting point for identifying an aircraft. When the owner is a holding company or booster LLC, we trace it to the people or institutions behind it through state corporate filings and SEC filings.
As of mid-2026 the FAA began withholding registered-owner names from the public registry by default. We froze a snapshotof the public registry before that change, so the pre-redaction baseline that ties tails to owners is preserved. The companion privacy lever, and how it differs from hiding a plane’s movements, is covered in how aircraft try to hide.
Donor and booster filings
Boosters often own the aircraft a program uses, and that can surface in disclosure filings. A gift-in-kind form can name a donor’s aircraft given to a program, with a date, a value, and sometimes a purpose. Where such a form redacts the recruiting destinations, the ADS-B track for that tail on those dates can fill them back in. Coaching contracts, separately, sometimes disclose personal flight-hour perks, which are a contractual benefit, not recruiting, and we label them that way.
When a record and a track agree
The strongest evidence we publish is a documented manifest whose passenger, date, and destination match an ADS-B landing. That agreement is a corroborated fact, and it is rare and valuable. More often the trail is partial: a filing gives a dollar amount but no destination, or a manifest is redacted, and the flight track fills the gap. We say which is which.
The line we don’t cross
We name a recruit only when a public source already does: an NCAA visit calendar, recruiting-media reporting, a signing announcement, or a FOIA manifest. We never infer that a named person was aboard a flight from a flight path and a home address. If removing the recruit data would stop us from flagging a flight, then the data was doing the detecting, and that is a guess, not a finding.
The same standard governs our reporting generally: see the occupant-evidence bar in our Editorial & Ethics policy.
What stays dark
The patchwork is the honest part of this. Many states broadly exempt university records, or route aircraft through foundations and holding companies that fall outside sunshine laws. In those states, ADS-B is often the only public window into a flight, and a manifest is simply not available at any price. And even where we do obtain manifests, the trip that made an aircraft worth watching turns out to be a minority of its flying. Most of it is administration, personal and family travel, maintenance, and repositioning, which is why we eliminate the known before crediting a flight to anything more interesting.
If you believe a record here is wrong or out of date, please tell us, and see corrections.