There is a species of fish in the Amazon basin called the glass catfish.
Its body is almost entirely transparent.
Not camouflaged. Not hidden. Transparent. You can see its spine. You can see its organs. You can watch its heart beat from the other side of an aquarium.
The glass catfish does not hide by concealing itself.
It hides by making people believe there is nothing there worth seeing.
For a long time, that worked.
Then someone held a light source at the right angle, and the entire fish appeared.
It was never invisible.
It was only assumed to be.
I have been thinking about the glass catfish because of a program called LADD.
And because of what LADD reveals about one of the most expensive mistakes an entrepreneur can make.
THE PROGRAM
LADD stands for Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed.
It replaced the old Blocked Aircraft Registry Request program after the 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act required a more robust framework for protecting private aircraft owners from public flight tracking. The idea is straightforward. You enroll your tail number. The FAA instructs its participating vendors to filter your data from public display. You disappear from FlightAware and Flightradar24 and every other tracking platform a journalist, a litigant, or a business rival might use to know exactly where your aircraft went last Tuesday.
The program is real. The FAA administers it seriously. The vendors comply with it faithfully.
And it does not do what most people who enroll in it believe it does.
Here is what almost nobody explains clearly at the point of enrollment.
Your aircraft broadcasts a continuous signal. It is called ADS-B, Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, and the FAA mandates it for virtually all aircraft operating in US airspace. The signal carries your position, your altitude, your speed, and a unique identifying code. It transmits on a public radio frequency, unencrypted, to anyone within range who wants to receive it.
LADD instructs the FAA to filter your data from the feeds it sends to commercial vendors.
LADD has no authority over the radio signal your aircraft is legally required to broadcast into open air.
Anyone with a software defined radio receiver, a piece of equipment that costs approximately thirty dollars, can pick up that signal directly. Volunteers around the world do exactly this, feeding the data into open source networks that operate entirely outside the FAA ecosystem and have no obligation whatsoever to honor your enrollment on the LADD list.
Jack Sweeney, the flight tracking researcher who became famous for tracking the private jets of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift despite their enrollment in the program, never used FAA data. He used crowdsourced receivers. Legal letters were sent. Platforms banned him. He kept tracking. Not because he found a flaw in the program. Because the program was never designed to address the data source he was using.
The FAA states this plainly on the LADD program page.
It is not buried in footnotes.
The question is whether the people enrolling in LADD, and the people advising them to enroll, read that sentence and understood its implications.
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL TRANSLATION
This is not fundamentally a story about aviation.
It is a story about the gap between what you paid for and what you actually have.
And that gap is one of the most common and costly places an entrepreneur can live without knowing it.
Due diligence, in its truest form, is not the act of confirming that something exists. It is the act of understanding precisely what that something does and does not do. Where its authority begins and where it ends. What it covers and, more importantly, what it quietly assumes someone else is covering.
LADD is not a fraud. It is a legitimate program that does exactly what it says it does.
The problem is that what it says it does and what its users believe it does are separated by a single sentence that most people never read carefully enough.
In business, this gap appears everywhere.
The insurance policy that covers the event but not the specific circumstance under which the event occurred.
The non-disclosure agreement that protects information shared in formal meetings but says nothing about conversations over dinner.
The contract that assigns intellectual property but contains a carve-out three clauses deep that quietly reassigns the most valuable piece of it.
The cybersecurity software installed across every endpoint in the organization, with a misconfigured rule that left one door open.
The compliance certificate that confirms the process was followed, without confirming that the process was the right one.
In each of these cases, the entrepreneur did something. Filed something. Paid for something. Received a confirmation that something was in place.
And then assumed the problem was solved.
The signal, in each case, was still broadcasting.
WHAT DUE DILIGENCE ACTUALLY IS
Most entrepreneurs treat due diligence as a checklist.
Has the contract been signed? Yes. Has the policy been issued? Yes. Has the audit been completed? Yes. Has the program been enrolled? Yes.
The checklist is not wrong. It is incomplete.
Because a checklist confirms the existence of things.
It does not interrogate their architecture.
Real due diligence asks a different set of questions. Not whether the protection exists, but what the protection actually covers. Not whether the document was signed, but what the document does not say. Not whether the system is in place, but what the system assumes about the environment it operates in.
The LADD program assumes it is operating in a world where all flight data flows through FAA channels.
The real world contains thirty-dollar radio receivers operated by volunteers in forty countries.
The gap between those two worlds is where the exposure lives.
And the entrepreneur who does not ask about that gap is the one who discovers it at the worst possible moment. Not during planning. Not during review. But during the crisis that the protection was supposed to prevent.
CLAUDE
The tool that best serves the entrepreneur committed to genuine due diligence is Claude.
Not for generating documents. Not for writing contracts.
For interrogating them.
One of the most valuable and underused applications of Claude is the act of uploading an agreement, a policy, a program description, or a regulatory framework and asking it to identify what the document does not cover. What assumptions it makes. What scenarios it leaves unaddressed. Where the language is precise and where it quietly becomes vague.
Most advisors will tell you what a document does.
Claude will help you understand what it does not do.
Imagine uploading your aircraft privacy enrollment confirmation and asking Claude to map the full chain of data from broadcast signal to public display, and identify at which points the enrolled program has authority and at which points it does not.
Imagine uploading your standard vendor NDA and asking Claude to identify the three scenarios under which a court might find it unenforceable.
Imagine uploading your cybersecurity policy and asking Claude to identify the assumptions the policy makes about user behavior that your actual team does not consistently exhibit.
These are not questions most people think to ask.
They are exactly the questions that separate entrepreneurs who discover their exposure in planning from those who discover it in litigation.
The difference between the two is not intelligence.
It is the quality of interrogation applied to what you believe you already understand.
THE FINAL WORD
The answer for private aviation is not to abandon LADD.
It is to pair it with the Privacy ICAO Address program, which addresses the broadcast signal itself by assigning the aircraft a temporary rotating code that cannot easily be tied to its registration. LADD and PIA together represent the closest thing currently available to meaningful privacy in the ADS-B era.
Neither one alone is sufficient.
This is almost always how genuine protection works.
Not a single program. Not a single document. Not a single enrollment confirmation.
A layered architecture, each element understanding what the others do not cover, the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
The glass catfish was never invisible.
It was only assumed to be.
And assumption, in business as in nature, is a form of exposure wearing the costume of safety.
The smartest protection in the room is never the one with the most institutional endorsement.
It is the one that knows exactly where the signal is still broadcasting.
"Whoever digs a pit may fall into it; whoever breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake. Whoever quarries stones may be injured by them; whoever splits logs may be endangered by them." Ecclesiastes 10:8-9
Let’s Stay Connected ✨
I’d love to keep the conversation going beyond this post. If you found these insights valuable or simply want to exchange ideas, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s a great space to share perspectives, build meaningful connections, and grow together.