A Democratic senator said her campaign was 'hitting the road' in an RV to tour the state, but public flight information indicates her million-dollar private plane followed the same campaign route.

Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said she was 'very excited to hit the road' for a 'Veterans for Claire' tour.

The RV was unveiled late last month by the senator, who is in a tough re-election contest.

The campaign kept a live blog of its three-day RV trip across the Show-Me State from May 29 to May 31, posting updates of its whereabouts. And McCaskill heavily touted the trip on her personal twitter account with its 457,000 followers.

McCaskill slammed the report that she was on a plane instead of the RV.

'I added some stops with the use of the plane, but I was on the RV so much that the broken door drove me crazy,' she told Politico on Tuesday, adding that 'I even lost an iPad around a corner on the RV.'

Sen. Claire McCaskill and her campaign heavily promoted the RV tour on social media

McCaskill touted all the people she met on the tour

McCaskill's team poses in front of 'Big Blue' as they called the RV

McCaskill owns a single-engine turboprop plane such as the one pictured

She disputed the notion that the use of the plane allowed her to 'pretend' that she was using an RV instead.

'I spent two-plus days on the RV,' McCaskill said, and the plane 'picked me up at the end of one day, after I spent all day on the RV' before being used to add 'some stops.' The RV wasn't used during that added portion of the tour, she said.

'Anybody could have followed me. They could have seen when I got off the RV and when I went and got on the airplane,' she continued, describing the report as 'election-year silliness.'

The Washington Free Beacon newspaper found that the travel records of a private plane belonging McCaskill indicates that it was used to travel between campaign stops.

The aircraft is a single-engine turboprop valued on McCaskill's Senate financial disclosure forms at more than $1 million dollars.

McCaskill has taken steps to hide the use of her plane, the newspaper notes.

In a 2017 email obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, McCaskill asked the Federal Aviation Administration to block radar tracking information on her plane from being publicly broadcast on the internet.

But websites such as ADS-B Exchange use a different type of data transmission to make tracking information available to the public.

The GPS-based data transmitted by McCaskill's plane for the days of her RV tour indicates that it was used to travel between campaign stops.

The Washington Free Beacon offered minute-by-minute tracking of the aircraft for the three days of the senator's tour: On Tuesday, May 29, McCaskill's tour took her from Waynesville in central Missouri, west to Springfield, and then further west to nearby Joplin, according to the campaign's blog.

The plane, according to the tracking data for the day, took the same route.

The small aircraft then left St. Louis where it is based and headed toward Springfield just after 3:00 p.m. and arrived 30 minutes later, right around when McCaskill was done meeting with local student journalists on the RV, according to her blog and social media posts.

The plane then traveled west toward Joplin, and then at 5:22 p.m., seven minutes after McCaskill posted that she was done with her event in Joplin, the plane took off toward Kansas City, the site of McCaskill's first event the next day. The flight landed at 5:51 p.m., about two hours earlier than the RV would have arrived.

On Wednesday, May 30, according to the tracking data, the plane again took the same route as the McCaskill campaign's RV tour, which went north from Kansas City to St. Joseph, and then southeast to Columbia.

Her plane left Kansas City at 11:30 a.m. after her event there had concluded and arrived in St. Joseph, about an hour drive, just 15 minutes later. The plane left St. Joseph at 1:26 p.m. and arrived near Columbia, a three-hour drive, just 30 minutes later.

The plane does not appear to have been used on May 31, the final day of the RV tour, when the campaign went from Hannibal to Arnold, just outside of McCaskill's hometown of St. Louis.

The newspaper noted it could not determine whether McCaskill actually traveled on the plane herself. Her campaign did not respond to inquiries.

All indications from the McCaskill campaign were that she was traveling on the RV.

The campaign noted 'Big Blue' - as they nicknamed it - traveled 700 miles and also made fundraising appeals to fuel it complaining, 'gas is expensive.'

'It costs us $200 just to fill up the RV and with the number of places we plan on going—that adds up fast,' the campaign wrote. 'Will you pitch in just $5 today to help fund our RV tour and power us to a victory in November?'

McCaskill's campaign also used the RV to make fundraising appeals, saying fuel was expensive

Sen. McCaskill thanked Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey for joining one of her rallies

Sen. Claire McCaskill is in a tough re-election campaign

McCaskill has gotten into trouble in the past for using taxpayer money to fund her private plane travel. This year she has been paying its operating costs out of her own pocket.

Campaign filings from 2017 showed she was spending about $7,000 per month to use it.

In her 2012 race, McCaskill reimbursed the federal government for all of her flights on the plane – close to $90,00.

She and her husband, wealthy St. Louis businessman Joseph Shepard, also had to pay back personal property taxes on the aircraft - forking over roughly $320,000 in back taxes and penalties.

Later the family 'sold the damn plane' as McCaskill called the problem vehicle.

However, in December 2013 her office announced her husband's company had purchased another small aircraft.

'Claire may occasionally use the plane, but will always do so at her own expense. Even if she uses the plane for Senate travel, Claire will never seek reimbursement from the Senate,' the statement said.