An ex-Qantas airliner with missile defences
Wing of Zion — Israeli state Boeing 767-300 · 4X-ISR
This is the only aircraft on this board that is not private property. 4X-ISR is a Boeing 767-300ER belonging to the Israeli Air Force, operated by 120 Squadron as the state transport for the prime minister and president. Its name is the Wing of Zion.
Its history is stranger than its job. The airframe first flew in June 2000 and was delivered to Qantas less than a fortnight later, where it spent fourteen years as an ordinary passenger aircraft. Israel bought it secondhand in 2014, and it took until 2016 to arrive and years more to convert — a programme that ran long, ran expensive, and became a domestic political argument in its own right. Part of the row was capacity: the finished aircraft carries far fewer people than the conversion was supposed to deliver.
The modifications include a laser-based infrared countermeasures system built by Elbit, designed to defeat shoulder-launched heat-seeking missiles. That is not standard equipment on a 767, and it is the clearest single indication of what this aeroplane is for.
It appears in our log regularly. Being a state aircraft, its movements are of a different kind of interest to the rest of this roster, and it is worth being clear that everything here comes from the same source as every other card: the aircraft's own broadcast, received by volunteers on the ground.
One footnote for aircraft people. There is another ex-Qantas jet on this board, and it went the other way — Travolta's 707 was built for Qantas, and has just been shipped back to Australia to become a museum piece. Two Qantas cast-offs, on the same page, by complete coincidence.
What we have actually seen: picked up airborne
16 times since we started
logging on 14 July 2026, most
recently 9 September, at up to
39,025 ft.
Every other jet on the board is below.