Vibe-coded jet tracker triggers eerie data spike April 6

Kyle McDonald built the “Apocalypse Early Warning System” after a Trump comment about Iran’s stakes pushed him to think about who gets critical information first. Using a worldwide network of radio receivers and historical baselines, his model flags private-je

On a quiet day in Los Angeles, Kyle McDonald’s project does what it’s supposed to do: listen, filter, compare, and assign an “emergency level” to the movement of private and charter jets. But when he went back to calibrate the numbers, one date refused to sit quietly with the rest of the pattern.

The model’s biggest spike came on April 6—“right around the moment that prompted me to create the project in the first place.” McDonald said he felt something snap into place as he watched the graph climb. “That freaked me out. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, it’s real.’”

The “Apocalypse Early Warning System” was built as a joke with an edge: if something really bad is coming. maybe the people who move through private skies will notice first. McDonald’s deeper aim is less playful. He built the system using code. machine learning. computer vision. and surveillance-style tools to ask a question that has grown sharper since the “fake news” era—when anti-vaccine sentiment and climate misinformation became mainstream. and public trust in truth started to feel unstable.

McDonald framed the project around information itself: who gets it, who controls it, and who people actually trust anymore. His starting point was a threat from President Donald Trump about Iran. saying a “whole civilization” would die if leaders didn’t agree to a ceasefire deal. For McDonald, that was the spark that connected power, timing, and the flow of information. If elites benefit from private information in prediction markets. politics. and crypto. he wondered. why wouldn’t the same logic apply to existential risk?.

To turn that worry into something trackable. he created a website that listens to a network of radio receivers around the world that pick up aircraft signals. The system maps positions, altitudes, directions, and identifying information, then filters the stream down to private and charter jets. From there, it compares how many are flying at any given moment to a number he says he would expect.

That “expected number” is not a guess pulled from thin air. McDonald built it from years of historical data. accounting for patterns across the day. the week. and holidays such as Thanksgiving. Christmas. and New Year’s. Once the model could produce emergency levels. he moved to the question that mattered most for the tone of the system: what counts as a level-five emergency?.

He decided level five should mean private jet activity is higher than it has been in the past year.

It’s not a claim that billionaire jet movements can predict an apocalypse. McDonald said directly he is not saying private jet activity can predict the apocalypse. But he also does not let the anomaly disappear into hand-waving. “It’s alarming that there are patterns at all.”

His unease ties into something he’s been watching in the culture around wealth for years. He said people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos can seem to exist outside the normal limits of power—able to do not just something about their problems. but anything they want. To McDonald, that’s why hidden signals matter. “They become people we watch for signals for what we should do. ” he said. even if people don’t realize they’re doing it.

That throughline shows up in earlier work too. including how he approached surveillance and visibility during the George Floyd protests in Los Angeles. McDonald said he helped friends build an app to help protesters track police activity. They pulled in air traffic data for LAPD helicopters. and he noticed some helicopters visible in the sky weren’t showing up on the map. He said he learned the LAPD often masks the identities of its helicopters. That experience drove him to figure out ways to track and “unmask those patterns. ” skills he later used in the jet-tracking project.

But the same instinct that makes his work compelling also has made it dangerous. McDonald said his ICESpy and FuckLAPD projects—both of which use facial recognition to identify law enforcement officers—have been the subject of multiple news broadcasts and “a whole lot of vitriol.” He added that he has even received death threats.

If the project’s mission is built around information and trust. the money side is built around survival—and what he’s willing to become for it. McDonald runs his own business that he describes as both an art studio and a consulting firm. He said about half his income comes from creative and technical consulting for tech companies and artists. He works with clients who might hire him to make an AI project feel more creative than scary. or to help them use sensors. cameras. or interactivity in ways they can’t execute on their own.

The other half of his income comes from exhibitions, mostly in Europe and East Asia. He said these shows “augment” his income. but aren’t sustainable in a way that allows steady living—because an exhibition might pay $1. 000 for a flight. then involve spending a week working 16-hour days installing the project before heading home.

In that system, he pays himself $60,000 a year. In Los Angeles, he called that modest, but said he feels proud that he can live on his own while making art that “isn’t primarily for the art market.” The rest of his earnings goes back into his projects.

The billionaire jet tracker itself has become a small revenue stream. McDonald said people can get free Telegram notifications, or pay $5 a year for email or text alerts. He said about 2,488 people have signed up. For him, that number is more than a statistic. “To me, that’s like getting an annual art grant.”.

He contrasted the $5-a-year subscriptions with what he says tech jobs can offer: in those, someone might make $10,000 in a few days. He said he could likely earn more in tech, but is proud of his career and wants to be happy with who he is in the world.

What fascinates him about the model is the customer behavior itself. “People are basically paying me $5 a year for the chance not to receive a text message,” he said. “That feels like a conceptual intervention, an artwork, and a software service all at once.”

For McDonald, the “border” between play and purpose is where he wants to work. The emergency levels are a provocation; the data spikes—especially the one tied to April 6—are the part that won’t stay fictional. And even as he insists he is not predicting catastrophe. the project keeps pressing on the same nerve: in a world where truth feels unstable and power seems to move on its own schedule. how much of what matters arrives early—and for whom?.

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