Privacy ICAO aircraft address (PIA) program is now fully established, so Mr Elon Musk should be happy. To paraphrase Mr Musk, he didn’t want some lunatic putting a bullet in his head.
What is the PIA program, well it basically allows the owner of an aircraft or it’s operator to request a fake ID for that aircraft while it is inside air space under the juresdiction of the FAA.
To facilitate this, the FAA has effectively created some 50,000 fake identities – yes you read that correctly. These fake identities have to be used in conjunction with a fake call sign, making aircraft identification very difficult – unless you are close enough to use the Mk I eyeball.
As I’ve already said on here, plane spotters don’t actually care who’s on a plane. Possibly the Paperazzi do, but I’m pretty sure that if I spoke to 50 spotters that none of them would even have the slightest care about the passengers – unless a member of family was onboard. Even then a spotter is still likely to be more interested in the aircraft (Unless you’re in a spotters family – then I’m sure they are more interested in you than the plane), or at least taking a passing interest.
Over the past few days I’ve been looking at aircraft operating using this new program, what I can tell you is that from a spotters perspective it is a bit perplexing. But first some of what I’ve found on the FAA site ind in the downloadable database.
A check on my scrapes database indicates that these are all assigned in the reserved file, and they are assigned to the “SBS PRGM OFC” as at 31st July 2023 there are 50,003 registrations reserved to this user. These seem to have been assigned in five groups as described below, there are real allocated registrations in all these ranges.
| Date | Count | N-Number Range | Notes |
| 2020/02/27 | 2484 | N1025P to N1901U | Group #1 |
| 2020/02/28 | 11391 | N101AQ to N9076S | Group #2 |
| 2020/02/29 | 27197 | N126AQ to N208GB | Group #3 |
| 2020/03/01 | 3843 | N208GN to N220QF | Group #4 |
| 2020/08/16 | 5088 | N4146Y to N429TQ | Group #5 |
The fake identities are already in use, with quite a number being issued – well from what I can see on various flight radar type applications. Interestingly, although ADS-B Exchange was purchased by NetJets – they have an active filter that allows you to view aircraft with a PIA. More on this subject to follow, where I’ll show some examples of how the flights are hidden – along with suggestions on what to try to find out the identity of an aircraft.