Privacy of general aviation aircraft in the NextGen

Future general aviation aircraft are mandated to openly broadcast aircraft identities and real-time position reports for air traffic management. Significant safety, performance, and flexibility gains are expected for airspace users and air traffic control. However, easy access to air traffic communications and increasing data mining abilities on the Internet, potentially enable anyone to remotely identify and track an aircraft belonging to a targeted real-world user. This tracking capability and the personal, political, medical, or proprietary nature of air travel, together raise operator privacy concerns in general aviation. An example concern is ability to infer travel intent and profile places of interest of an aircraft operator. This paper presents a framework to classify the current state of the art in privacy protection for general aviation, and identify the major challenges and tradeoffs for privacy solution design. We propose a new solution space that can minimize the risk of general aviation operator privacy invasions.