Shame there's not a carfax like service for planes that used something less mutable than a tail number. After that last flight, it was almost certainly sold to some CIA front company, given a new number, and sent back into the air.
I put together a few "ADS-B receivers" recently (using Raspberry Pis, RTL SDRs, etc.) and, for a few days afterwards, was watching all of the aircraft in my vicinity pretty intently.
I live a few miles from the Monroe County, Indiana, airport, KBMG, and (on 16 November 2015) saw a small airplane go over my house that had just taken off from there (heading east at altitude 2700 feet). I looked up the tail number, N721AL, and saw that it was registered to the US Department of Justice.
A little bit of Googling (the tail number) turned up an article [0] entitled "Track 115 Aircrafts the FBI uses for surveillance". I was left wondering why they'd be performing any such surveillance in my area (if that is, indeed, what they were doing), as we're not exactly a "hot spot" of criminal activity, but I suppose no one is exempt.
reply