Can WSPR Detect Aircraft?

Status: draft (pre-registered, awaiting data extraction) Issue: #120 Pre-registration: PRE-REGISTRATION.md

The prior question

Before we can responsibly evaluate any hypothesis claiming WSPR data can trace aircraft (e.g., the Godfrey WSPR-MH370 hypothesis), we must answer the prior question:

Can WSPR detect commercial aircraft at all, against ground truth, on a recent date with full ADS-B coverage and full WSPR archive coverage?

If the answer is no, the hypothesis is dead regardless of how compelling post-hoc pattern matches look. If the answer is yes, we have a reference signature for what an aircraft crossing actually looks like in WSPR data.

The honest design

1. Pre-registration is locked before any data extraction — see PRE-REGISTRATION.md. This is the contract.
2. Selection criteria, statistical test, threshold, and decision rule are all defined in advance.
3. We pick station pairs whose great circle paths cross the North Atlantic Tracks corridor (50°N 30°W) — the busiest oceanic air corridor on Earth.
4. We pick a recent date — 2026-04-03 (a Friday with dense ADS-B coverage).
5. We pull WSPR spots from our 11.53B archive and ADS-B from OpenSky Network.
6. We compute crossing events using great circle geometry with a 25 km Fresnel zone tolerance.
7. We detrend SNR for diurnal ionospheric variation (30-min rolling median).
8. Welch's t-test on |SNR residual| at crossing bins vs non-crossing bins.
9. Bonferroni-corrected α = 0.00333 (3 pairs).
10. Permutation null with 1000 shuffles is mandatory.
11. Visual confirmation plot is mandatory.

Decision rule

Outcome	Criterion
Positive	All three: parametric p < 0.00333, permutation p < 0.00333, visible by eye
Negative	All three: not significant, no visible association, null distribution overlaps observed
Ambiguous	Anything else. Reported as ambiguous, not promoted to positive.

Honesty compact

• No moving thresholds after the fact
• No data-dependent metric switching
• No additional pairs tested if the first three are null
• No switching dates if the first date is null
• No comparison to MH370 in this paper (separate study)
• Negative result is published. A clean null on this is a bigger paper than a maybe-positive.

Status timeline

• Pre-registration locked (2026-04-10)
• OpenSky API client set up
• Station pairs selected per §5.1 of pre-reg
• WSPR + ADS-B extracted for 2026-04-03
• Pre-registered analysis run
• Result: TBD