Hi everyone, good to see you back here! 

Did your flight tracking skills take off last month? We’re back with five new challenges that will introduce you to yet another open source research skill. 

We’re also highlighting some great blog posts and write-ups from community members that explain how they solved last month’s exercises. 

Bellingcat researcher Trevor Ball is part of our human rights and conflict monitoring team. He specialises in identifying munitions used in conflicts, particularly in incidents involving civilian harm. You might have seen his work on the strike at a school in Minab, Iran, earlier this year. By analysing video footage, he, alongside other Bellingcat researchers, managed to identify a US Tomahawk missile striking close to the school. 

Sometimes, no video footage of a missile strike is available. In these cases, the clues left at the scene after the blast are what open source researchers use to find out more about what happened and who is responsible. These clues could include missile remnants, damaged buildings, or a crater. This investigation is a good example of how this can be put into practice.

This month, the challenges will allow you to practice these techniques yourself. Good luck! Challenge.bellingcat.com  

In our Discord server, you’ll find others working on the challenges. This is where you can share your findings with others or ask for help. 

SPOILER ALERT: From this point on, we’ll be discussing last month’s challenges. If you still plan to complete them, you may want to skip this section.

Here are the answers to the ‘Above and Beyond’ challenges:

For DamCoffee and Ratlee, the planes proved to be a useful starting point in ‘Touching Tarmac’. Reverse image searching led them to a visual match with ‘Aerocaribbean’ planes, an airline based in Havana, Cuba. DamCoffee mentions that the vegetation around the airport looks tropical, and therefore begins by looking at airports in Cuba. At Havana airport, they were able to find features in satellite imagery that matched the photo. 

In ‘No Climbing’, a mysterious object needs to be identified. Through reverse image searching, Faaiz Kaleem found that it is a rocket part on display in Utah. In a video embedded in a publicly accessible blog post, they managed to find a snippet of a sign with more information. Pausing the video at that moment allowed them to identify the correct name. 

We turned to Nezr Kaan’s blog, Field Notes, to find the answer to ‘Window Seat’. The photo was taken at 12:55 on 24 February 2026. Nezr first identified the mountains visible from the window. The snowy peaks and shapes suggest that it is likely the Alps. The second step for Nezr was to check which airlines in Europe have the yellow engines that you can see in the photo. Checking for flights by Condor, Icelandair or Vueling over the Alps at the time given in the description, they found two matches on FlightRadar24. They matched the shapes of the valley to find which of the two planes was flying at the exact same location.

In ‘Rainbow Vision’, we again find a photo taken from a plane window, but there’s one notable difference from the other photo, the rainbow glare across the photo. To get started, in the metadata of the photo Faaiz Kaleem found a date and timestamp. Identifying the city was also straightforward; reverse image searching suggested Chicago. Searching for information about plane windows showing a ‘rainbow hue’ provided a crucial hint. The results pointed to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the plane known to have this rainbow feature. This narrowed down the search results in FlightRadar24, leading to the correct ICAO code. 

The final challenge last month was ‘X Marks the Spot’. Faaiz Kaleem first ruled out military operations and recent hurricane activity. He looked into past Atlantic hurricane seasons to identify storms affecting the region pictured. On tropicalatlantic.com, he found aerial reconnaissance missions for North Atlantic storms categorised by storm and other classifications, then by mission. These archives, combined with ADS-B Exchange, allowed him to compare historical flight paths. That’s how he matched the  flight path pictured in the challenge photo to Mission 5 during Storm Ernesto on 13 August 2024.

Want to put these aviation exercises into practice? Make sure to check out the Bellingcat toolkit for more helpful tools for flight tracking.

That’s it for this month’s Bellingcat Challenge Newsletter. We’d love to hear your feedback on the challenges. You can also join us on Discord and let us know if you have ideas for future challenges.

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you and you’d like to subscribe, you can do that here.

Before we go, here are some links to other current projects from Bellingcat:

See you next month!