Documents Reveal US Contractor’s Modifications of Spy Plane Just Before Flights Over Gaza

A Zeteo exclusive by Jason Paladino and Tobias Burns

*Palestinians walk past the rubble in Rafah on Jan. 20, 2025. Photo by AFP via Getty Images*

A US defense contractor flew spy planes over Gaza. FAA docs show Sierra Nevada Corporation installed a military air traffic control device and surveillance equipment before the plane’s deployment.

The near-daily spy flights, carried out from December 2023 through October 2025 and coordinated by the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force using planes and equipment from US military contractors, put the countries at risk of aiding and abetting war crimes, international legal experts told Zeteo.

The UK maintains that intelligence gathered from the flights was solely for the purpose of locating hostages captured during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel.

But lawmakers in the UK, UN officials, and human rights attorneys have expressed concerns that the intelligence could have been used by Israel for its military operations in Gaza, which have resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths and have been classified as genocide by both a United Nations investigative panel and a leading association of genocide scholars.

“The British and American governments would be on notice that intelligence they provided for targeting would likely be aiding and abetting war crimes, and to aid and abet a war crime is the same as to commit a war crime. That’s the potential criminal liability at stake here,” former director of Human Rights Watch Kenneth Roth told Zeteo.

On July 28, a pilot employed by the Nevada-based defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corporation seemingly forgot to disable a device that broadcasts flight details live during a surveillance flight over central Gaza, as first reported by Palestine Deep Dive (PDD).

The apparent mistake revealed that the plane, a highly modified Hawker Beechcraft Super King Air 350ER, circled for hours over central Gaza on the same day that multiple Israeli airstrikes killed at least 23 Palestinians in the same area, including women and children. The aircraft watched Gaza from above, using the callsign “CROOK12.” Not long after, researchers with investigative outlet Declassified UK found another aircraft, owned by the same company, had also flown surveillance missions over Gaza months earlier.

The two aircraft are owned by Straight Flight Nevada Commercial Leasing LLC, a Nevada-based corporation, according to the FAA registration documents. The company is owned by Sierra Nevada Corporation, a large defense contractor that rarely makes headlines but has won US government defense contracts worth tens of billions of dollars.

Zeteo requested airworthiness documents from the Federal Aviation Administration on two aircraft and can reveal new details about the potential cause of the pilot error, as well as the role of US military contractors in a mission previously performed by the UK’s Royal Air Force.

Airworthiness documents are required by the FAA when US-registered aircraft are modified or overhauled.

According to the documents, the aircraft broadcasting CROOK12 had just days earlier been modified with highly controlled military equipment in the United States, including a device meant to identify “friendly” or “foe” aircraft from other militaries, including the Israeli Air Force. This modification likely allowed the aircraft to be better integrated with existing Israeli military standards.

The documents, when paired with publicly available flight data, make it possible to track the modification, testing, and eventual export of the aircraft from a Sierra Nevada Corporation hangar in Hagerstown, Maryland, to the Royal Air Force Akrotiri base in Cyprus, where it would begin near daily surveillance flights in July 2025.

Details of Modifications

CROOK12 was modified with a communications device that allows military air traffic control systems to identify aircraft as friendly or potentially hostile, and to determine aeronautical information like speed and heading. The device is marked in the FAA paperwork as “For Military Use Only,” and requires special FAA permission to be tested.

The equipment, called an APX-119, is produced by RTX Corporation (formerly known as Raytheon Technologies) subsidiary Collins Aerospace and works with more than 100 types of vehicles and other systems used by the US Department of Defense, as well as multiple international users, per the company documentation. The system requires cryptographic input to protect against spoofing and misidentification, military aviation experts told Zeteo.

“It’s a coded signal that can go from a ground station to an aircraft and determines whether that aircraft is a friend or foe,” Jim Cardoso, senior director for the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute, told Zeteo. “If you’re what we call ‘squawking,’ you have a certain code in the [system], then the ground system knows that you are a friendly aircraft.”

Military contractors note that the APX-119 transponder has a special designation under the State Department’s international trafficking in arms regulations (ITAR) regime. The equipment “counts as not only a defense article under ITAR jurisdiction, but is also Significant Military Equipment,” according to a training brochure from defense contractor PSI. This designation, reserved for equipment that is deemed “warranted because of their capacity for substantial military utility or capability,” according to federal regulations.

These devices are also used by the Israeli military. On Nov. 17, 2025, Department of Defense documents show that the US planned to transfer APX-119 units to Israel as part of an $18.82 billion arms deal that included new F-15IA fighter jets. The devices were mentioned in a joint resolution of disapproval of the arms transfer filed by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

The disclosure of the Beechcraft’s flight path over Gaza was due to what a UK military source told The Times last year was a “schoolboy error.” While aviation analysts have speculated that this error could be related to pilots’ use of the transponder, it’s unclear whether the APX-119 system was directly involved in the accidental disclosure.

According to the FAA documents, the aircraft had a civilian transponder system removed just before the APX-119 was added. The unit advertises that it can be used to broadcast civilian transponder signals as well as military identifiers.

The second aircraft, CROOK11, was outfitted with a Wescam MX-15, a powerful high-definition camera system built by L3 Harris, according to publicly available images of the aircraft. This system can capture heat and night vision imagery. Marketing materials advertise the system as “An Ideal Surveillance Solution for: ISR – Medium-Altitude Covert Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance.”

That same aircraft was captured on an aviation enthusiast’s YouTube channel three years ago at an airshow in Hagerstown, Maryland, where Sierra Nevada Corporation operates a hangar. In the video, a placard displays the surveillance capabilities of the aircraft. Alongside the retractable MX-15 camera, the aircraft is outfitted with a jam-resistant GPS system. Israel has been known to jam GPS signals, creating safety issues for local commercial aviation.

The placard also lists “provisions for 7 different SI [signals intelligence] systems,” extended fuel tanks to allow for 7 hours of flight time, and provisions for “multi-level secure networks,” most likely for transmission of live data, in this case to the Israeli military.

*Beechcraft King Air 350ER. Screenshot from YouTube/@danscoolvideos6024.*

A History of Surveillance Flights

The British surveillance flights began in December 2023 and initially used the RAF Shadow R1 aircraft, a Beechcraft King Air, similar to the Sierra Nevada Corporation aircraft, loaded with sensors, cameras, and radios. These flights continued almost daily until mid-2025, when the effort was mostly privatized and outsourced to the Sierra Nevada Corporation planes and pilots, according to publicly available flight data.

A report in the UK’s The Times, citing unnamed RAF officials, explained that the change was due to the existing Shadow fleet in need of maintenance and usage elsewhere.

“The safety of British nationals is our utmost priority. In support of the ongoing hostage rescue activity, the UK Ministry of Defence will conduct surveillance flights over the Eastern Mediterranean, including operating in airspace over Israel and Gaza,” Grant Schapps, the secretary of state for defense at the time, said in a statement in December 2023.

The last British hostage abducted during the October 7 attack to be held by Hamas in Gaza was released in January 2025. Yet the flights continued – for months.

Privatized Surveillance, Minimal Transparency

After the flight path was exposed in August, investigators like Iain Overton, executive director of UK nonprofit Action on Armed Violence, who had been chronicling the British military’s involvement in Gaza, took a closer look at Sierra Nevada Corporation’s aircraft. He found that the privatized mission had started earlier than UK military officials had previously disclosed.

Using historical public flight data, Overton found that another aircraft owned by Sierra Nevada Corporation had been broadcasting its location as it departed from Cyprus on Dec. 11, 2024, and circled over the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. The next day, Israel bombed the camp, killing more than 30 Palestinians and wounding over 50 others. Images and videos circulated online showing the bloody aftermath. “The [Israeli] occupation army knew that this is a residential block with many apartment buildings housing dozens of civilians, children, women and displaced people,” the Government Media Office in Gaza told Al Jazeera shortly after the attack. It is unclear whether the Israeli military used any intel that may have been provided from the flight the preceding day.

“Ministers have repeatedly framed these missions as unarmed sorties focused on ‘hostage recovery,’ yet the scale and pattern of the flights suggest a broader ISR role. The aircraft have the capacity to map movement, intercept signals, and track activity across extensive areas,” Overton told Zeteo. “The aircraft involved were equipped with sensor suites capable of extraordinary precision. They can count the movements of armed actors, map the location of structures, and trace activity in real time.”

And yet Overton found that the British government, much like its US collaborator, wasn’t following its own policies on ensuring information shared with the Israelis wasn’t being used to kill civilians. He also encountered high levels of secrecy when he attempted to uncover information about the contract awarded to SNC.

“The Government insists that all foreign intelligence sharing must comply with the UK’s human-rights duties, but it refuses to set out the mechanisms by which this is guaranteed. When I requested the OSJA-linked intelligence risk-assessment forms that should accompany any sharing arrangement, the FCDO [UK equivalent to the Department of State] stated that it holds no such documents,” Overton said. “Key details are withheld behind redactions, and the MoD’s refusal to discuss operational relationships with SNC or its subsidiaries means Parliament is effectively shut out.”

Overton characterized the lack of transparency as a “deliberate fog.” It’s “a system that relied on private firms to perform sensitive surveillance tasks while ensuring the public could not see what they do, what it costs, or how the information they collect was used.”

Several members of Parliament, tasked with providing oversight of the surveillance mission, have been stonewalled, met with claims that operational security outweighs the public’s right to know.

“It is welcome that the UK surveillance flights over Gaza have stopped, but it does not remove the need for proper scrutiny,” UK Member of Parliament Helen Maguire, a Liberal Democrat, told Zeteo. “The government has still not sufficiently set out what outcomes those flights delivered in terms of supporting the recovery of the hostages, nor what safeguards were in place to ensure any intelligence gathered was not used in military operations by Israel.”

“The British public deserves clarity about the operations carried out in their name, and to know with certainty that the UK was not complicit in egregious human rights abuses in Gaza,” she added.

The Israeli embassy in Washington did not respond to Zeteo’s request, asking what procedures are in place to ensure the aerial intelligence was used solely for hostage rescue purposes.

A Surveillance Contractor Flying Under the Radar

Sierra Nevada Corporation, the company that owns and operates the surveillance aircraft, rarely makes headlines.

The company was the 27th largest Pentagon contractor last fiscal year, with over $2.07 billion in obligated defense dollars. Its top customers include the US Air Force and US Special Operations Command. Public job postings show the company is hiring pilots with active US “Secret” security clearances for positions in Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR) missions, deployed in positions outside the continental US.

Zeteo reached out to SNC for comment, and to ask if its pilots active over Gaza are US citizens. The company declined to respond.

Legal Implications?

International legal and humanitarian experts told Zeteo that US contractors doing surveillance over Gaza could be held liable if they were providing information used in targeting for attacks carried out by Israel, due to the indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment.

While the death toll in Gaza is more than 72,340 people – more than half of them women and children – other estimates place the number significantly higher.

If information from the surveillance flights was shared with Israel and used for targeting, the lack of concern for civilians is the reason for legal liability, Kenneth Roth told Zeteo.

“Some of the bombing was openly indiscriminate, such as dropping 2,000-pound bombs on neighborhoods. Were the British and American governments providing information about which neighborhood to bomb? […] More recently, the big problem has been that even if the Israeli military was going after a presumed Hamas fighter, if they were tolerating up to 20 civilian deaths as an appropriate price to pay for killing one Hamas fighter, nobody in their right mind thinks that is a proportionate civilian cost.”

*A Palestinian boy stands among the rubble of the Saftawi neighbourhood of northern Gaza on Aug. 25, 2025. Photo by Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images*

The UK Ministry of Defense said in a statement in October 2025 that it “strictly controlled what information was passed on and only information relating to hostage rescue was passed to the relevant Israeli authorities.”

The ministry added that “the surveillance aircraft were always unarmed, did not have a combat role, and were tasked solely to locate hostages.”

However, a UN report published just days after the ministry’s statement appeared to contradict the UK’s official narrative. The report noted the coincidence of the flights with Israeli operations.

“From its bases in Cyprus, the UK has enabled a crucial US supply line to Tel Aviv and flown over 600 surveillance missions over Gaza throughout the genocide, sharing intelligence with Israel,” the UN report, authored by Francesca Albanese, United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory, found. “Flight numbers and durations, often coinciding with major Israeli operations, suggest detailed knowledge and cooperation in the destruction of Gaza, extending beyond ‘hostage rescue.’”

A timeline of the surveillance missions

December 2023: RAF missions over Gaza begin using Shadow R1s, per Palestine Deep Dive (PDD). This is confirmed by Watkins/The Times.
December 2023 through July 2025: 600 RAF Shadow Fleet flights over Gaza, per Watkins/Times.
Dec. 3, 2023, through March 27, 2025: Minimum of 518 ISR flights over Occupied Palestinian Territories, per Action on Armed Violence.
Oct. 10-15, 2024: N60125 [CROOK11] is “recommissioned” and modification of MANGA F system for GPS jamming protection, according to airworthiness documents.
Dec. 5, 2024: “Beechcraft belonging to the US contractor with the registration N60125 arrived at Akrotiri on 5 December 2024, having flown from Hagerstown, Maryland, via St John’s, Reykjavik and Palermo,” per Declassified UK.
Dec. 11, 2024: Per Declassified UK: “CROOK11 left Akrotiri at 20:14 UTC, arriving over Gaza at 21:10 UTC. It orbited above Nuseirat for around 20 minutes, its fixed track consistent with detailed optical or signals surveillance, before heading back to Cyprus, switching off its transponder en route at 22:17 UTC, and landing shortly after.”
Dec. 12, 2024: Israel bombs Nuseirat Camp, per Al Jazeera. Beechcraft Super King Air 350 with the registration N60125 and callsign CROOK11 circled over Gaza the same day, per Declassified UK.
Dec. 12, 2024: “[T]he RAF’s Shadow ZZ419 left Akrotiri at 15:05 UTC, went dark near Gaza, and reappeared less than an hour before the bombing,” per Declassified UK.
July 10, 2025: US plane test mission from Hagerstown Regional Airport circling over Everett, Pennsylvania, per PDD. This plane is registered N6147U, per Times.
July 12, 2025: US plane flies to St. John’s regional airport in Newfoundland, per PDD.
July 13, 2025: US plane flies to Keflavik airport in Iceland, per PDD.
July 14, 2025: US plane flies to Belfast, then to Palermo, per PDD.
July 15, 2025: US plane arrives at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, per PDD.
July 18, 2025: US plane flies test circles off Akrotiri, per PDD.
July 20 to July 24, 2025: Daily flights over Gaza from 2pm to 8pm, escorted by RAF Shadow 1, per PDD. This is confirmed by Steffan Watkins for The Times.
July 25, 2025: Last RAF flight over Gaza before outsourcing to SNC, per PDD.
July 28, 2025: US plane forgets to turn off transponder after taking off at 8pm, per PDD. US plane arrives over Gaza at 9pm and circles for 90 minutes over Khan Younis. This is confirmed by The Times.
Aug. 4, 2025: Palestine Deep Dive report published.
Aug. 6, 2025: UK Times confirms US plane flights and UK hiring of SNC.
Aug. 12, 2025: Declassified UK report published.