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arXiv · 2611.08791

AircraftWitness: How Often Aircraft Can Locate Recordings

Kris Atallah
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Abstract

Aircraft overhead can reveal where an outdoor recording was made. Propellers and rotors leave Doppler curves in audio, and public ADS-B archives log equipped aircraft. We measure how often, blind and against chance. Our main test was registered and timestamped before any audio, and its two amendments came before any answer was read. It covers 24 new places, with the recorders' own clocks, a 300 s slack and a 20 km square. The best of three locators places clear-pass clips within 1 km at 4 places, where a uniform guess predicts 0.57 (p = 0.0065 after correcting for the pick). With the wrong time or swapped audio it places none. The other two hit 1 and 2. On 360 clips from 7 places of a GPS-timed network, two locators place 6% and 8% within 1 km. By place, a unit chosen after that run, they hit 4 and 5 of 7 where a uniform guess predicts 2.3. On 1,600 random public recordings, picked and cut without the truth in a time-bounded run, the three locators answer at most 20 times and place at most 2. We release AircraftWitness, a benchmark, and pass labels for 11.7 million recordings.

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Kris Atallah. 2026-11-05. AircraftWitness: How Often Aircraft Can Locate Recordings. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08791

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