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Late last night, an Airbus A340-300 took off from Munich International Airport in Germany. It’s possible that the plane was empty apart from the crew, though it may have been carrying a passenger who was looking to get out of town quickly. The brown-and-white jet, named “Bourkhan,” is owned by Alisher Usmanov, who has been known to visit spas in the Bavarian Alps. At the time of the takeoff, the Russian oligarch had been banned from travel in the European Union five hours earlier.
Twenty minutes later, a Twitter bot created by a college student dutifully fired off a tweet notifying anyone who was watching that Usmanov’s plane was headed east. Hours later, it touched down in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Usmanov’s hometown.
Usmanov’s plane isn’t the only one tracked by @RUOligarchJets. The bot is tweeting updates whenever the movements of 46 jets owned or leased by more than 20 Russian oligarchs hit ADS-B Exchange, a site that collects data from aviation enthusiasts who run their own equipment to monitor airplane movements. Many of the oligarchs have been hit with sanctions and travel bans.
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