EXCLUSIVE: Documents Reveal US Contractor’s Modifications of Spy Plane Just Before Flights Over Gaza
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.
UK surveillance flights over Gaza were conducted with more US involvement than previously known, Federal Aviation Administration documents obtained by Zeteo reveal.
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.