Matt Thurber, editor-in-chief at AIN Media Group, has been flying since 1975 and writing about aviation since 1978 and now has the best job in the world, running editorial operations for Aviation International News, Business Jet Traveler, and FutureFlight.aero. In addition to working as an A&amp;P mechanic on everything from Piper Cubs to turboprops, Matt taught flying at his father’s flight school in Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1980s, flew for an aircraft owner/pilot, and for two summer seasons hunted swordfish near the George’s Banks off the East Coast from a Piper Super Cub. An ATP certificated fixed-wing pilot and CFII and commercial helicopter pilot, Matt is type-rated in the Citation 500 and Gulfstream V/550. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Matt and his team cover the entire aviation scene including business aircraft, helicopters, avionics, safety, manufacturing, charter, fractionals, technology, air transport, advanced air mobility, defense, and other subjects of interest to AIN, BJT, and FutureFlight readers.

Editor-in-Chief

Matt Thurber

Swedish flight data network Wingbits has released an AI-based platform that allows users to use plain language queries to create autonomous agents to monitor live and historical flight tracking information. Wingbits obtains flight-tracking data from a network of 6,000 ADS-B receivers in 120 countries, and it offers rewards to contributors who install receivers and provide optimized coverage or fill gaps in reception.
To conduct a search on Wingbits.AI, users post a query such as “track every private jet landing in Nice” or “flag GPS interference around Estonia.” Users can also set up automated monitoring routines, and when Wingbits.AI has a result, it sends a notification to the user via email, Slack, Telegram, or Google Sheets, with more integrations being added. The result links to the relevant information on the Wingbits map.
The connection between aircraft and tracking data comes from Wingbits’ captured encrypted ADS-B data matched with fleet registries, operator records, and ownership databases. While the historical data, monitoring feature, and full access to the Wingbits network are available to subscribers, the Wingö AI chatbot is available to anyone and responds with information about current flight activity.
“Last year, we focused mostly on growing the community and increasing the coverage,” Wingbits CEO and co-founder Alex Lungu told AIN. “But now we’ve got to a point where we feel quite comfortable to start productizing some of that coverage.” Wingbits still needs additional receivers and is looking for users to install them in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, South America, and Africa, he added.
Wingbits doesn’t provide the receivers but publishes specifications so users can source their own at a cost of about $500. The rewards system allows users to trade in tokens that they earn for various incentives. Last year, Wingbits distributed $30,000 worth of stablecoins to members who earned rewards. This year, the company has added airline miles and lounge access as rewards. “That’s a real-world benefit,” Lungu said.
Wingbits believes that this incentive system makes the company’s flight-tracking network different than competitors with volunteer networks of ADS-B receivers. “If you rely on volunteers,” he explained, “you have no control over where these volunteers are located. You can have one thousand people in Washington and one person in Stockholm. If your reward is getting access to the platform, then why would you ever go on the rooftop [to mount a receiver for better reception]? You can just put your station in the basement, and when you go on holidays, you can unplug it, so the model is not easy to scale. You’re going to grow where those volunteers are.
“We wanted to do it differently, as a revenue-share model with the community. To do that, we had to create a performance-based engine, which is a way of detecting which station on our network is the one that did go up on the rooftop. They can set up multiple stations to increase their revenue. We can take out a lot more higher-quality, low-latency data from each station than with a station set up by a regular enthusiast.”
In comparisons of Wingbits’ performance to other flight-tracking networks, Lungu said, Wingbits obtained 60 to 200% more coverage. “We see much better output when it comes to the community, and we also grew in a very different community than the existing networks are based on…We brought in people completely new to flight tracking…which means we have stations and locations that other people don’t have.”
As a new flight-tracking network, Wingbits was able to incorporate security measures, such as encrypting ADS-B data that it gathers. “We only accept data coming from stations that we onboarded,” he said, “and that allows us to verify the data a lot faster and more securely, which in turn results in lower latency because we’re not open to the public [receivers].”
According to Wingbits, “This structure not only outcompetes traditional volunteer-based networks, but also gives Wingbits data independence that aggregated commercial feeds or leased satellite capacity cannot replicate. Unlike incumbents, every Wingbits receiver carries a cryptographic security chip that digitally signs each signal it captures at the point of collection. The signature makes every data point traceable to a specific physical device, providing a layer of protection against GPS spoofing and data manipulation that conventional flight tracking networks do not offer.”
“Flight data has been hiding in plain sight for years,” Lungu said. “Near-misses that go unseen in the skies; surveillance aircraft circling a new region; a leader’s plane redirected mid-flight hours before it appears in the news. Anyone can look up and see the plane. What no one could do, until now, was talk to the sky and get a simple answer back. Wingbits.ai changes that.”

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