Overview#
Intelligence analysts receive a tip that a private aircraft may be transporting prohibited cargo between two countries. The aircraft's registration is known but its current location is not. Within seconds of querying the Aviation domain, the aircraft appears on the tracking map, still airborne, current altitude and heading visible. Its historical flight paths show six similar routes over the past month. A geofence alert is configured on the destination airport. When the aircraft enters the monitored zone, the assigned investigator receives an automatic notification.
This is aviation intelligence in practice: real-time tracking, historical analysis, geofence monitoring, and sanctions screening working together as a single investigation workflow.
Key Features#
- Real-Time Aircraft Tracking: Monitors aircraft positions using ADS-B transponder data with updates every few seconds for global coverage.
- Multi-Source Data Aggregation: Combines data from multiple aviation data providers to maximise coverage, including unfiltered feeds that include military and private aircraft.
- Flight Pattern Analysis: Sophisticated algorithms detect suspicious flight behaviours including unusual loitering, route deviations, and anomalous flight characteristics.
- Aircraft Ownership Intelligence: Retrieves registration, ownership, and operator information for aircraft of interest.
- Sanctions Screening: Screens aircraft registrations and ownership against sanctions databases to identify flagged entities.
- Geofence Monitoring: Monitors geographic boundaries including borders, restricted zones, military areas, and custom zones with automated alerting on violations.
- Historical Trajectory Analysis: Retrieves and analyses historical flight paths for investigative review and pattern recognition.
- Route Prediction: Projects future aircraft positions based on current heading and speed for operational planning.
- Aviation Intelligence Profiles: Generates comprehensive profiles combining real-time position, registration data, ownership, and flight history.
- Commercial Flight Data: Accesses commercial flight schedules, airline information, and airport data for supplementary intelligence.
Use Cases#
Intelligence analysts track aircraft of interest in real time across multiple data sources, including military and private aircraft that may be filtered from standard tracking services, a critical capability for investigations where the subject uses non-commercial aviation to avoid scrutiny.
Investigators analyse historical flight trajectories to identify patterns such as repeated visits to specific locations, unusual routing through conflict zones, or connections between aircraft and known staging areas.
Border security agencies configure geofences along international boundaries and restricted zones, receiving automated alerts when aircraft enter monitored areas, particularly valuable for detecting smuggling routes that avoid standard entry points.
Sanctions compliance teams at banks, insurers, and trading firms screen aircraft ownership and registration information against sanctions databases to identify potential violations before processing transactions related to aviation assets.
Defence analysts use route prediction to anticipate where an aircraft of interest will be in the near future, enabling intercept planning or coordinated ground surveillance at projected arrival points.
Integration#
The Aviation domain integrates with the investigation system for case-linked analysis, the sanctions screening module for compliance checks, the alert system for automated notifications on geofence violations and suspicious patterns, and the anomaly detection module for identifying unusual flight behaviours.
Open Standards#
- ICAO Annex 10 / ADS-B (DO-260B): aircraft are tracked by their 24-bit ICAO transponder address (ICAO24 hex), squawk codes, barometric and geometric altitude, and ADS-B state vectors sourced from multiple feeds conforming to ICAO Annex 10 surveillance specifications.
- ICAO Doc 8585 / IATA airport and airline codes: aircraft, airline, and airport records carry both ICAO four-letter and IATA three-letter designators, enabling interoperability with civil aviation databases and commercial flight data sources.
- Eurocontrol ASTERIX (All-purpose Structured EUROCONTROL Surveillance Information eXchange): position records carry a position-source flag that distinguishes ASTERIX radar-derived reports from ADS-B and MLAT, allowing the system to ingest surveillance data in the ASTERIX category format alongside other sources.
- MLAT (Multilateration, ICAO Doc 9924): the position model explicitly identifies Multilateration as a third surveillance source alongside ADS-B and ASTERIX, supporting ground-based receiver networks that locate aircraft without an ADS-B transponder.
- WGS 84 (EPSG:4326): all aircraft position records store latitude and longitude in decimal degrees on the WGS 84 ellipsoid, the reference datum used by ADS-B transponders and GPS receivers.
- GraphQL (June 2018 specification): the entire aviation domain API surface, including queries for real-time positions, historical trajectories, geofence monitoring, and aircraft registry, is exposed as a typed GraphQL schema.
- OAuth 2.0 / JWT (RFC 6749 / RFC 7519): all aviation API access is gated by bearer token authentication using JSON Web Tokens issued by the platform identity service.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-05 Last Updated: 2026-04-14