There is a question that many people have asked themselves: if the world was about to end, who would be the first to know? The answer, according to a programmer based in Los Angeles, is obvious: the richest and most powerful of the planet.
Under this premise, Kyle McDonald has created a website that, at least in theory, allows an alarm signal to be raised before the chaos begins. Is called Apocalypse Early Warning System (Apocalypse Early Warning System) and the idea, although disturbing, is quite simple: if suddenly there are many private and corporate jets in the air at the same time, it is that the millionaires and people in power (not always politicians) who rule already know something that you don’t.
The logic behind the tracker. The system works with public data from the ADS-B signals (Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast) in real time. This location system is the one that all aircraft must emit to indicate their position, altitude and speed with the aim of maintaining order in air traffic.
As explained on its website, McDonald filters all that data that is public to keep only the signals that emit private and charter jets. There is more than 23,000 private jets in operation around the world, so the website filters them and compares them with a historical average that takes into account the day, time and holidays. The result is a score that assigns an alert level from 1 to 5. 1 is total normality, while 5 means that private jet traffic has registered an abnormally high volume compared to the previous year, alerting that something anomalous is happening and may not have made the news yet.
The spike that proved it works. Until now, the highest level recorded by the system shot on April 6. That day, Iran launched a massive offensive with drones and missiles against US and Israeli targets. In an interview for Business InsiderMcDonald claimed that “I was frozen. I thought, ‘Oh my God, it really works.'”
The creator himself clarifies that a level 5 does not guarantee any disaster. It can coincide with a long vacation or with a specific event or with a political summit and, when it departs from the historical pattern, the alert is raised. Therefore, context matters. But the coincidence of the increase in private jets in the air with one of the most tense days of the year in the Middle East is consistent enough to be an indication that the millionaires are getting safe.
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The Pentagon pizzas, but with private jets. The idea of using seemingly unconnected data to detect unusual activity on the flights of millionaires and top executives of large companies is not new. There is a very famous precedent: the so-called Pizza Meteror Pentagon pizzometer. The theory goes that when Pentagon staff work late because of an impending crisis, orders to nearby pizzerias spike. During the Cold warit is believed that the Soviets monitored these deliveries as a sign of American strategic activity.
There is no official data to confirm this, and critics treat it more as a meme than real intelligence. However, this index has been successful for decades as an early warning system that something is brewing in the Pentagon. He went ahead to Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and in June 2025, they anticipated the alert in the face of an imminent bombing by Israel and the US on the Iran nuclear facilities.
Millionaires, bunkers and signs of escape. Millionaires wear decades in the making for an apocalyptic event. After the pandemic, they were shot the sales of land in New Zealand by millionaires, on which mansions have been built under which luxurious bunkers are hidden.
The premise is that, when the time comes, they will be the first to run and get to safety before everything jumps into the air. McDonald’s system turns that intuition into something measurable thanks to the details of your private jets.
Image | Unsplash (Jacob Rosen), Gerd Altmann
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