NBAA’s first regional conference of the year, held January 29 at Atlantic Aviation at West Palm Beach International airport (KPBI) focused hard on corporate privacy and efficacy. Bookending sessions on taxes and aircraft purchase financing were two educational sessions that helped attendees sort out how to continue flying anonymously with the sunset of FAA’s BARR (Block Aircraft Registry Request) program and how to combat increased aircraft insurance premiums through FOQA (flight operations quality assurance).

Michael McConnell, founder of Aero Data Science, put it simply: insurance companies have consolidated, again, and the result is that owner-operated business aircraft are about to get hit with double-digit insurance premium increases. Why pick on owner-operated business aircraft? This group doesn’t typically collect and analyze its own flight safety data.

“FOQA is what the great majority of airlines use to collect flight ops data,” said McConnell. “And it is mandated outside of the United States.” FOQA is a data-collecting system that shows how aircraft are flown throughout a range of normal, everyday operations. The data collecting can be handled with hardware, such as the diminutive MiniQAR MkIII produced by Avionica, or software driven, calculated from recordings processed by CloudAhoy or ADS-B tracking products from Fltplan.com, ForeFlight or Flightaware, for example.

McConnell explained to the group how he had appealed to underwriters in London with aggregated anonymous data from a group of business jet operators. “I was able to secure a 38 percent reduction in these operators’ insurance premium going forward,” he said.

He encouraged attendees to fight back against rising insurance premiums with data and at the same time use the operations data to tweak the safety of their flights through non-punitive education for pilots.

ADS-B Privacy Concerns

Heidi Williams, NBAA's director of air traffic services and infrastructure, and Doug Carr, vice president of regulatory and international affairs, tag-teamed in a session focusing on the procedures flight departments must now perform for true anonymous flight through the U.S. ADS-B system.

“We have a number of private companies that have evolved around the rise of ADS-B [and] will transmit your data through their own network and make it public while you are flying,” explained Williams. “That’s a glitch in the privacy system called BARR. LADD is the transition from BARR and is key to preventing real-time transmission of ADS-B data,” LADD stands for Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed and aircraft already participating in the BARR program should be transitioning to LADD, according to Williams and Carr.

Getting on the LADD list entails navigating to https://ladd.faa.gov or emailing ladd@faa.gov. It is also not the only hoop you have to jump through to provide your aircraft with total anonymity when it flies with ADS-B Out.

“The second feature that's come online in 2020 is called the privacy ICAO address program, PIA,” said Carr. “This program is in direct response to third-party non-government networks of ADS-B tracking capability that have really made flying anonymously in the ADS-B world extremely difficult,” he continued. 

PIA decouples the FAA registry that lists your transponder’s six-digit hexadecimal code from your public aircraft registration number. The program allows operators to substitute that assigned ICAO code with a temporary code, which will not be published on the FAA website or anywhere else online. 

“This code will be useable as much as you like…but only over the continental U.S., for now,” said Carr. “We are working on international operability and getting Eurocontrol onboard.” Requesting to participate in PIA starts at faa.gov/nextgen/equipadsb/privacy/.

Carr also mentioned that reprogramming the ICAO code is a maintenance procedure. “Some avionics make it a simple matter to reprogram, but there are a few systems that require more time for the procedure,” he cautioned.

Finally, several network providers are offering third-party call signs for flight departments, which complete the triangle of masking an aircraft’s identity in the ADS-B system. Adding a third-party call sign makes sure that even if your flight ID is not blocked by LADD, it is still a challenge for an eavesdropper to track the actual aircraft.