JesusJets' mission is to track and report on private jet usage by selected megachurches and their pastors and particularly to report on carbon emissions from this flights.
Using public and open flight data available from Airplanes.live we monitor private jets which have been identified as owned by (or controlled by/attributed to) high profile megachurches or their pastors and report when they are on the move and emitting carbon dioxide (CO2).
JesusJets' is the latest flight tracking initiative from the same team that brought you SiliconJets.
When a flight is live we update its status every 20 minutes using open flight data available from Airplanes.live and produce rough flight track maps using the static map tiles from OpenStreetMap using the Leaflet library. Prior to 1 April 2024 our flight data came from ADS-B Exchange.
We have an automated bot which monitors our selected flights and then makes reports every 20 minutes on our Mastodon account as well as on Bluesky with X, Facebook and Instagram on the way. We also posts weekly and monthly summaries.
We calculate estimated emissions for the duration of flight which we have tracked. At the moment all the aircraft we track are variants of the Gulfstream G650 which produces an estimated 4825 kg (5 metric tonnes) of CO2 per hour of flight based on the emissions offset calculator from Paramount Business Jets. We are looking for indicative scale of emissions so there is no factor applied for take off/landing phases of flight when emissions might be higher.
We then compare this to an estimate of emissions of the same flight distance were made using standard commercial aviation services. We base this estimate on emissions estimates at Carbon Independent. This site provides a range of estimates of emissions from 180 kg if CO2 per passenger hour to 350 kg of CO2 per passenger hour. We have adopted 250 kg of CO2 per passenger hour for our estimates.