How did CBS news know what flight Witkoff was on?

Factual Questions
1

CBS news reported that a member of the notorious Signal chat was in Russia at the time.

Witkoff arrived in Moscow shortly after noon local time on March 13, according to data from the flight tracking website FlightRadar24[…]

I’ve used FlightRadar24 and it has a lot of data, but it doesn’t tell you who is on the flight. How could CBS know exactly which flight(s) Witkoff took to get to Moscow? The article sidesteps this part.

Although this is a political story, my question is just about the mechanics of how CBS got its intelligence, not a discussion about the political issues, though they may be legion. So I posted in FQ.

2

You missed the second half of the sentence.

Witkoff arrived in Moscow shortly after noon local time on March 13, according to data from the flight tracking website FlightRadar24, and Russian state media broadcast video of his motorcade leaving Vnukovo International Airport shortly after.

So Russian media was nice enough to show which airport Witkoff arrived at. From there CBS could use FlightRadar24 to track which flights from the U.S. arrived in Moscow at what times. Odds are Witkoff didn’t hang around the airport for very long.

3

If they knew that he was in a motorcade leaving the airport, isn’t the flight a moot point? They’re just working backwards trying to make a correlation to the known facts. The important thing is that he was in Moscow. I would have reported:

Russian state media broadcast video of Witkoff’s motorcade leaving Moscow’s Vnukovo International Airport shortly after noon on March 13.

4

To report the story your way leaves out the independent reporting CBS did to confirm the time Witkoff actually arrived and that Russian media weren’t just using file footage.

5

That assumes there is only one flight that could have come from the US and it just happened to arrive at that time.

EDIT: I guess what I am saying is that it proves only that a plane arrived at about that time. It doesn’t really confirm anything.

6

Seems likely that he would have been on a US government flight, with a US government tail number and callsign - not commercial or even private charter (there are no direct commercial flights from the US to Russia at all currently due to sanctions, and direct private charter flights may be blocked too). If the arrival video shows the tail number, or even aircraft type/livery matching, then the reporters can be confident in using the timing reported by the flight tracking site. Odds are there weren’t any other US government flights to Moscow that same day.

7

In fact, there are no flights at all between Washington and Moscow, and no American airline flies directly from the U.S. to Vnukovo International Airport at all. I easily found that on Trip Adviser. So:

a) If Witkoff had flown commercially to Moscow -Vnukovo he would have had to take something like Turkish Airlines from New York to Istanbul and change planes. Pretty clunky and not very secure for a special envoy to the President engaged in delicate negotiations.

b) Any plane coming directly from the U.S. to Vnukovo would have to be either a private charter or a government-owned plane. And it’s easy to tell the difference by the plane’s tail number.

This isn’t exactly deep-dive investigative journalism. It’s more like following ta trail of crumbs.

ETA: Basically what andrewwm said.