At a time when no one was supposed to be getting in or out of Australia and people in Melbourne weren't meant to leave their homes, Crown Casino's fleet of Bombardier Global Express XRS were surprisingly busy throughout 2020 and 2021.

These jets are described as "one of Australia's most luxurious ways to travel" and were bought for the purpose of moving high-rollers from Asia in and out of the country, often carrying large amounts of cash needing to be laundered.

With access to millions of crowd-sourced aviation 'pings' from around the globe, we were able to trace flight histories of Crown's jets, ping-by-ping, throughout 2020, and this analysis revealed they had regularly flown from Melbourne to locations as diverse as Bangkok, London, Manila, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Honolulu and Phuket.

Intriguingly, a number of flights in Crown's logs were to undisclosed locations across the Pacific, and through a combination of interviews, open-source intelligence and SOCMINT, we discovered that these planes had been used to transport COVID-19 vaccines and medical staff to Tuvalu and Fiji.

We employed a combination of techniques to determine that these mysterious flights had been to undertake aid work on behalf of the Australian government.

These included algorithmic web scraping, OSINT identification, social media analysis, and HUMINT.

After discovering, through interviews, that some of these trips had been for aid work, but without details of what this work was or where in the Pacific this work had been carried out, we scoured various social media channels for clues.

In one photo, a partial Australian tail number could be seen. We wrote a script that programmatically scoured the country's plane registry records for other Bombardier Global Express XRS jets whose tail number could be a match.

We narrowed this list down further by finding photos of these planes and comparing their exterior designs and tail number fonts with those of the plane pictured. Lastly, we looked at the flight records of these planes to see if they had been in the Tuvalu area in that period.

Confirming the other flight, to Fiji, followed a similar pattern, although our key initial clue was a few frames of a video produced by emergency medical personnel heading to Fiji. We were able to positively identify their video as being filmed in a luxury charter flights centre operated by a Darwin pearling company.

The use of these jets, which have less baggage capacity than a VW Transporter Van, for aid work prompted criticism from independent politicians.

Just as importantly, by automating the initial step (searching through flight pings), we were able to identify the initial story and the scale of it within minutes.

The end result was a front page investigation for The Age, and for The Sydney Morning Herald.

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For Business Insider, we also hit on a surprising finding which doubled as an indicator of the strength of certain parts of the economy.

After scraping, compiling and analysing daily airport arrival and departure numbers for around 1600 airports around Australia - from international hubs to dusty outback airfields - we found that most Australian airports had actually been busier during the pandemic than prior to it.

That was despite lockdowns grounding flights, decimating profits across the aviation industry and emptying the country's busiest airports including those in Sydney and Melbourne.

But away from the country's major airports, hundreds of smaller ones were seeing an increase in traffic, and particularly in areas like regional Western Australia, these numbers mirrored the buoyancy in the price of resources and the state's renewed appetite for mining exploration.

The number of extra flights these airports were receiving was a fraction of those the industry has lost, but they reflected one of the big positives in the economy at large, and were one of the few glimmers of light in an otherwise gloomy time for aviation.

The chart at the top of this page highlights some of the leading examples of this trend.