Is PIA traffic increasing?
I’d say that it most certainly is, since President Biden signed the new FAA legislation on the 16th of May 2024 there seems to be an increas in the visible traffic on ADSB Global.
What is PIA, it’s short for Privacy ICAO Address. Without delving into it too much, it’s a method that the US Government provides through it’s FAA, that can be used by any private individual to hide their private flying habits from the general public. The ICAO part is short for the International Civil Aviation Organisation.
Why bother about the fact that someone wants to hide, actually I’m not that bothered. I am a little iritated about the fact that a number of the individuals who want to obfuscate the fact that they are zooming around in private jets, are in some cases the people who would have you believe that they are in favour of a greener sustainable future.
Or in other cases people who have cultivated a public following, then decided that they want to cherry pick what the public sees of their lifestyle. I understand the security concerns that these people may have, infact I can sympathise with them on that point – not from any personal perspective, but for the reason that being famouse doesn’t give anyone an excuse to bother you.
My issue with the privacy codes comes from my interest in plane spotting, I don’t actually care who is on the aeroplane – I really only want to know if I’ve seen the plane before or not. As a plane spotter it is pretty annoying, I’m still looking for aircraft identities from many years ago. And as far as this PIA program goes I wasn’t bothered by it until I discovered that it may be used internationally.
There are many problems associated with people knowing where you are and are going, but in truth trying to hide the identity of your private Jet isn’t very effective – see the article from Forbes here and the lack of effectiveness becomes obvious. The chances of hiding from the spotting community are slim in the short term and pretty well impossible in the long term. Hiding from others not interested enough to use all the services and tecnology available might be easier, but in many cases these may well be the people that you want to cultivate.
As a footnote I would like to point out that the PIA program is free and available to any one, the FAA have assigned more than 50,000 ICAO codes to the program. As of now only a few hundred of these have been allocated, in reality to be effective, the codes have to be changed every few flights at least – but the logistics of that are quite difficult. So at the moment, the PIA program is enjoying very limited success.
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