Claire McCaskill's private plane used on campaign's RV tour through Missouri

Ranking Member Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., speaks prior to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly testifying before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on border security on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C (Reuters)

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.) said her campaign was "hitting the road" in an RV to tour the state, but public flight information indicates that travel also occurred on her million-dollar private plane.

The RV, named BigBlue by the campaign, was unveiled late last month by McCaskill, who said she was "very excited to hit the road" in it for an upcoming "Veterans for Claire" tour. The campaign kept a live blog of its three-day RV trip from May 29 to May 31, posting updates of its whereabouts.

Unmentioned on the blog is the role McCaskill's private plane played on the trip. The aircraft is a single-engine turboprop valued on her financial disclosure forms at more than $1 million dollars.

McCaskill has taken steps to hide the use of her plane. In a 2017 email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the senator asked the Federal Aviation Administration to block radar tracking information on her plane from being publicly broadcast on the internet. The request blocks the ability to track her plane on websites such as FlightAware.com.

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Websites such as ADS-B Exchange, however, use a different type of data transmission to make tracking information available to the public. Community members of the crowd-sourced website upload the ADS-B information broadcast by the plane and upload it straight into the site's free database, which can in turn be used to track planes such as McCaskill's.