Tracking VIP flights

Where did our Very Important Politicians get private jets to recently? So VIP flights are not technically an expense for a politician – but they are a huge perk and a significant cost to the taxpayer.

The RAAF runs six, very nice, planes which are available to senior members of the government to jet about the World in. These VIP flights run pretty constantly with specially trained defence force staff acting as crew and a pretty broad definition of what’s an acceptable use.

Our latest Gadget tracks these flights. As a default we show flights for the last 30 days – but you can choose any 30-day period and have a look. Where we can we display the flights on a map. However, that’s not always possible because the airport is not always available in the data. We also show a table with all the flights – even when there is a missing airport, so you can use your human brain to draw your own conclusions.

Tracking down this data presented a nifty problem to solve over the last ten days. But we now think we can reliably show VIP flights and summarise the data in a daily tweet.

The flights data is updated nightly runs approximately a day behind current.

The missing piece now is that while we are showing data for the planes – we don’t know who’s on them.

And there’s the final philosophical question: Is a private jet run by the air force actually a public jet?

See the VIP flight tracker here.