US aircraft privacy is not enforced in the air — it lives in a contract attached to the FAA's data feed. LADD does not silence a transponder; it obliges vendors using FAA SWIM data to stop redistributing what they pulled…

Squawk 7500 is the transponder code for unlawful interference — hijacking or a forced diversion. When it appears on a controller's radar, the controller asks the pilot once to confirm the code was set deliberately. Then the protocol does something…

Neither Delta flight 723 nor Delta flight 1288 appears in the airline's publicly searchable 2025–2026 timetables. Both numbers kept flying after their accidents. Retirement after a fatal crash is discretionary. No U.S. rule requires it, no Delta policy documents it,…

Squawk 7700 is the international transponder code for a general in-flight emergency. When a pilot enters it, radar displays at every control position normally flag the aircraft immediately, without waiting for voice communication. The code buys priority handling: controllers reroute…

No. There is no official registry of retired flight numbers. Not at IATA, ICAO, the FAA, EASA, or Australia's CASA. Airlines retire, reuse, or quietly reinstate numbers on their own, almost always without announcing it. Some famous retirements are confirmed…

FAA Source blocking, the strictest privacy tier in the FAA’s LADD program, stops FAA flight data from reaching any external vendor. The owner loses access to their own aircraft’s movements on services like FlightAware and Flightradar24. Subscriber-level blocking preserves owner…

Since March 2025, private aircraft owners in the United States have been able to ask the Federal Aviation Administration to withhold their names and addresses from the public side of the civil aircraft registry, under 49 U.S.C. § 44114(b). The…