Aircraft reports: methodology and AI disclosure

Data provenance

Aircraft observations are collected by the Rowanbank monitoring system. Local 1090 MHz ADS-B and Mode-S transmissions are received at Rowanbank and decoded using readsb. Supplementary aircraft information is obtained from Flightradar24 where available.

The observations are filtered and merged by the Rowanbank logging system to retain movements considered potentially interesting. Most routine scheduled commercial traffic, including much normal Heathrow and Luton traffic, is deliberately excluded. The reports therefore describe selected interesting sightings, not all aircraft activity over the area.

Deterministic analysis

Counts, repeated-aircraft patterns, closest approaches, altitude summaries, origin clusters and other numerical results are calculated automatically by deterministic software running on Rowanbank systems. They are not generated by the language model.

AI research and writing

A separate AI research stage uses an OpenAI language model with web-search access to investigate a limited set of noteworthy aircraft and patterns. It is instructed to prefer authoritative sources and to distinguish confirmed facts from plausible context.

A second AI stage writes the narrative report from the deterministic analysis and the curated research dossier. That writing stage has no web access of its own. External factual claims are linked to the sources used during the research stage.

Human review

AI-generated research and prose can contain errors, inappropriate connections or misleading emphasis. Reports are therefore generated as drafts and are not included in the public archive until they have been reviewed and explicitly approved for publication.

Privacy and limitations

The reporting process is designed not to infer aircraft occupants, not to infer beneficial ownership from trustee registrations, and not to defeat aviation privacy measures such as PIA. LADD is treated as a privacy/data display status rather than evidence of suspicious activity.

Closest-approach figures are horizontal distances from the Rowanbank reference point. Exact receiver coordinates are not published. ADS-B and tracking data should not be treated as authoritative evidence of an aircraft's exact position, altitude, route, purpose or compliance with aviation regulations.