TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums St. Maarten - St. Martin "Blocked" Airplane Lands at PJIA

Hi fellow airplane enthusiasts,
I have a question for you. A private airplane (pretty fancy with a nice paint job and three engines - one in the tail) landed at PJIA this afternoon at 3:08p.m. I like tracking planes but when I clicked on it, the signal was BLOCKED. I've seen it before but I was just wondering if any of the plane experts on TTOL know what type of individual is so important that their flight info is blocked? Government, Celebrity - any ideas?

Just curious on a cold, snowy day in Canada...

What app are you using. Are you using foreflight. My hubby is a pilot and doesn’t think they can block that info.

I was using Flight Tracker.

They can block the lientery but not the aircraft info....

That could be a privacy issue. You can try using foreflight but you have to pay for it

I see blocked planes flying around the Caribbean all the time. I've wondered why? I use Flight Radar 24 on the PTZ cam feeds and the only info given is altitude and ground speed.

German air charter. They just don't want anyone to know where they are. Happens a lot

3 engines=Dassault Falcon tri-jet (e.g. 900, there are a number of variants)
Many ADS-B websites allow operators to block the tail number as for this case, ADS-B Exchange (https://globe.adsbexchange.com/) does not so would have shown the tail number for this a/c. BUT I've noticed the coverage for ADS-B Exchange around SXM is quite poor, many a/c that are visible on, e.g., Flightradar24 show intermittently or not at all on ADS-B Ex. If I'm "virtual plane-spotting" I have both F24 & A Ex open.
As to why blocked, my observation is that blocked a/c are very often govt and private charters (as you can see by comparing ADS-B Ex with other services). Example the EC175 helicopter operating from MY Flying Fox moored in Great Bay earlier this week.
Dave.

I know this isn't about sxm, but I thought it would be of interest. https://www.protocol.com/elon-musk-flight-tracker

Thanks bluejacket for the link. Quite interesting.