The Apocalypse Early Warning System is a sign of the times: it assumes the rich will know it before everyone else, and that it may therefore be deduced from signs of panic among the rich. Namely, scrambling for their private jets.
In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse.
Built by Kyle McDonald, it has an archive of traffic and options to filter the data available (such as particular models of aircraft; the Embraer Phenom and Cessna Citation are most popular), an RSS feed and Telegram notifications. The code is on GitHub.
As of Monday morning, 230 of 11,482 tracked planes are airborne and the emergency level is a nice, placid 1.
It's a good example of putting public data to novel use: private jet locations must be published in real time so that public aviation is aware of potential hazards in the air. The rich don't like this and would rather fly dark, irrespective of the risks it creates, but for now, at least, we can see them.
The flight data comes from ADS-B Exchange heatmap files. Those files are published in half-hour slots and encode recent aircraft positions. The backend downloads the newest available heatmap, parses it, matches the aircraft in the heatmap against the tracked cohort, and stores the latest position, altitude, speed, heading, and airborne state for each match.
McDonald's other projects include small-batch loquat jams and MyEpstein, for "checking whether people in your world appear in the publicly released Epstein email archive."
