Between September 29, 2025 and January 27, 2026, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed more than a hundred Iranian nationals on three charter flights. Not one of those aircraft went to Iran. Each flew to Qatar or Kuwait, handed the people aboard to a Qatari or Kuwaiti aircraft, and turned round. This page reconstructs the American half of all three from public transponder data: which aircraft, which airports, which hours, and where the signal goes missing.
| Departed | Aircraft | Type | From | Handover | Iranians aboard |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 29, 2025 | N819AX | Boeing 777-200ER | Alexandria | Doha, Qatar | 54 |
| December 7, 2025 | N207AX | Boeing 767-200ER | Mesa | Kuwait City, Kuwait | 50 |
| January 25, 2026 | N351AX | Boeing 767-300ER | Mesa | Kuwait City, Kuwait | — |
Passenger counts are from the reporting; everything else in this table is from the transponder data. Every time on this page is UTC, so a late-evening departure from the United States appears under the following date.
The obvious way to look for a deportation flight to Iran is to search for aircraft landing at Iranian airports. It returns nothing, and it always will. US carriers cannot fly to Iran, so each of these charters stopped short — in Doha or in Kuwait City — and the people aboard were walked onto a Qatari or Kuwaiti aircraft for the last leg into Tehran. The closest any of them came to Iran was 118 km. The American aircraft turned round and went home.
What is trackable is the American half: a wide-body charter leaving a US immigration staging airport, crossing the Atlantic, and landing in the Gulf. That is the part reconstructed below, from the transponder broadcasts of the three aircraft that flew it.
N819AX · Boeing 777-200ER · Omni Air International · transponder ab2ae1
What the reporting says: Reported as departing the ICE staging facility at Alexandria, Louisiana with 54 Iranian nationals, refuelling in Puerto Rico and stopping in Cairo before Doha, where the deportees were moved onto a charter operated by the state-owned Qatar Airways.
What the transponder shows: N819AX flew 15,313 km in 19h 49m carrying 54 Iranian nationals from the United States to Doha, Qatar. The nearest it came to Iran was 193 km — its closest approach to any Iranian airport, Persian Gulf International Airport.
Showing September 30, 2025. Open this day on ADS-B Exchange →
| Date (UTC) | Leg | Distance | Time | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 29, 202516:20 UTC → 18:34 UTC | BWI Baltimore, USA→ AEX Alexandria, USA | 1,735 km | 2h 14m | Positioning |
| September 30, 202503:23 UTC → 06:58 UTC | AEX Alexandria, USA→ SJU San Juan, Puerto Rico | 3,021 km | 3h 34m | |
| September 30, 202509:46 UTC → 02:01 UTC (Oct 1) | SJU San Juan, Puerto Rico→ DIA Doha, Qatar | 12,292 km | 16h 15m | |
| No signal for 4h 02m — last seen over open water, back at 37,000 ft over open water. | ||||
| No signal for 2h 45m — last seen over Egypt, back at 16,150 ft near Capital International Airport, Egypt. | ||||
| No signal for 1h 09m — last seen over Saudi Arabia, back at 37,125 ft over Saudi Arabia. | ||||
| Handover at Doha, Qatar — the deportees were moved onto a Qatar Airways charter for the flight to Tehran, around 11:00 local time on October 1. That aircraft is not this one, and that leg is not in this table: it comes from the reporting, not from ADS-B. | ||||
The Doha stop was not at Hamad International, which handles the city's commercial traffic. The 777 parked at Doha International (OTBD), the older airport a few kilometres to the north-west, and sat there for two hours and 49 minutes before leaving empty.
Empty afterwards: it left Doha International Airport at 04:50 UTC on October 1, 2025 via Capital International Airport and Queen Alia International Airport, and was back on US soil at Alexandria International Airport on October 2, 2025.
N207AX · Boeing 767-200ER · Omni Air International · transponder a1ac1a
What the reporting says: One charter carrying both Russian and Iranian nationals. The ICE Flight Monitor recorded it leaving Phoenix, Arizona; Russian nationals were handed over in Egypt and flown to Moscow, and about 50 Iranian nationals were moved onto a Kuwaiti charter in Kuwait City.
What the transponder shows: N207AX flew 14,925 km in 19h 42m carrying 50 Iranian nationals from the United States to Kuwait City, Kuwait. The nearest it came to Iran was 118 km — its closest approach to any Iranian airport, Abadan Ayatollah Jami International Airport.
Showing December 8, 2025. Open this day on ADS-B Exchange →
| Date (UTC) | Leg | Distance | Time | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 7, 202509:01 UTC → 11:00 UTC | AFW Fort Worth, USA→ AZA Mesa, USA | 1,387 km | 1h 59m | Positioning |
| December 7, 202519:05 UTC → 22:37 UTC | AZA Mesa, USA→ BWI Baltimore, USA | 3,270 km | 3h 32m | |
| December 8, 202502:09 UTC → 18:19 UTC | BWI Baltimore, USA→ KWI Kuwait City, Kuwait | 11,655 km | 16h 10m | |
| No signal for 3h 21m — last seen over open water, back at 29,000 ft over open water. | ||||
| No signal for 4h 09m — last seen over Egypt, back at 26,600 ft near Capital International Airport, Egypt. | ||||
| Handover at Kuwait City, Kuwait — the deportees were moved onto a Kuwaiti charter for the flight to Tehran, at a time the reporting does not give. That aircraft is not this one, and that leg is not in this table: it comes from the reporting, not from ADS-B. | ||||
Empty afterwards: it left Kuwait International Airport at 09:56 UTC on December 9, 2025 via Sofia Airport, and was last tracked near Maniitsoq Airport on December 9, 2025.
N351AX · Boeing 767-300ER · Omni Air International · transponder a3e89a
What the reporting says: The same pattern as December: one charter out of Phoenix, Arizona carrying Iranians and Russians, a handover in Egypt for the Russian nationals, and a transfer to a Kuwaiti aircraft in Kuwait City for the Iranians.
What the transponder shows: N351AX flew 14,410 km in 17h 59m carrying Iranian nationals from the United States to Kuwait City, Kuwait. The nearest it came to Iran was 120 km — its closest approach to any Iranian airport, Abadan Ayatollah Jami International Airport.
Showing January 26, 2026. Open this day on ADS-B Exchange →
| Date (UTC) | Leg | Distance | Time | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January 25, 202614:41 UTC → 18:48 UTC | AZA Mesa, USA→ PSM Portsmouth, USA | 3,753 km | 4h 06m | |
| January 25, 202621:17 UTC → 11:10 UTC (Jan 26) | PSM Portsmouth, USA→ KWI Kuwait City, Kuwait | 10,657 km | 13h 53m | |
| No signal for 2h 36m — last seen over Egypt, back at 7,525 ft near Cairo International Airport, Egypt. | ||||
| No signal for 1h 18m — last seen over Egypt, back at 33,200 ft over Saudi Arabia. | ||||
| Handover at Kuwait City, Kuwait — the deportees were moved onto a Kuwaiti charter for the flight to Tehran, at a time the reporting does not give. That aircraft is not this one, and that leg is not in this table: it comes from the reporting, not from ADS-B. | ||||
Empty afterwards: it left Kuwait International Airport at 05:39 UTC on January 27, 2026 via Sofia Airport, and was back on US soil at Portsmouth International Airport at Pease on January 27, 2026.
The three legs that actually reached Iran are not on this page. Each was flown by a Qatari or Kuwaiti aircraft out of Doha, Qatar and Kuwait City, Kuwait, and this page does not yet say which one.
Finding them is the obvious next step and we are working on it. It means asking ADS-B Exchange for every aircraft in the Qatari and Kuwaiti fleets across the handover days and the days after them — a few hundred aircraft-days of queries — and looking for the one that left for Tehran within hours of each handover. It may not resolve: there are very few public ADS-B receivers inside Iran, so an aircraft on that route can disappear well short of Tehran. The departure from Doha or Kuwait City should be visible either way, and that is what we are looking for. When there is something to show, it will appear here.
The reporting named the operator and the departure city for each flight but not the aircraft. Those two facts are enough. The FAA's public registry lists every US-registered aircraft together with the transponder address it broadcasts, which yields the operator's wide-body fleet — they are registered to its parent company's leasing arm rather than to the airline — and asking ADS-B Exchange for each of those addresses on the dates in question leaves one aircraft per flight that left the staging airport the reporting names and flew to the Gulf.
Every airport, time, distance and gap on this page is then computed from the raw transponder traces for those three aircraft. Two things on the page are not: the number of people aboard and what happened after the handover. Neither is visible in ADS-B, and both are attributed to the reporting where they appear.
The tracks are not continuous. Public ADS-B coverage depends on volunteers running receivers, and there are almost none over the mid Atlantic or over Egypt, so these three flights are missing 20h 09m of signal between leaving the United States and landing in the Gulf. Those holes are shown as holes. The Cairo stops in particular do not appear as landings at all — each aircraft goes dark approaching Egypt and comes back climbing away from Cairo two to four hours later, which is consistent with the stop the reporting describes but is not the same as having watched it happen.