Privacy policy

Hangar Flying is made and run by Whiskey Victor LLC. This policy covers everything it runs: the panel designer and tools at hangarflying.com, and the maintenance records service at hangarflying.com/mro. It says what we hold, why, where it goes, and how long it stays.

The short version: we hold what is needed to run the sites and to keep your records, and beyond that only anonymous figures about how the sites are used. Nothing is sold.

About you. Your email address, which is how you sign in and where we send notices. On hangarflying.com, your password, which is stored scrambled so that nobody, including us, can read it back. On the maintenance records service, your display name and certificate number, if you enter them, which prefill the signature line of every entry you record, and your choice of appearance. For a shop, the shop’s name and contact details.

Your panel designs. At hangarflying.com, the panels you design and the files exported from them.

What you enter. Your aircraft, its engine, propeller and installed appliances, with their serial numbers and times. Maintenance entries, discrepancies, inspections, airworthiness directive dispositions, notes, and the times you record. For a shop, the customers you add: name, email, phone, airport and address.

What you upload. Photographs and documents, such as data plates and logbook pages. They are kept on our server, named by a fingerprint of their own bytes, and served only to the account whose aircraft they belong to.

About your visit. A record of each sign-in session: when it expires, the browser it came from, and whether you chose the shared-computer option. Sign-in attempts per email address for fifteen minutes, so an address cannot be hammered. A standard web server access log, holding the address your connection comes from, the page asked for and when, kept about two weeks and used to diagnose problems and block abusive addresses.

Anonymous figures. hangarflying.com uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages are used. Those figures are anonymous: they are not tied to your account, and we do not use them to identify anybody. The maintenance records service uses no analytics at all.

Nothing else. No advertising networks and no tracking. The maintenance records service sets two cookies: one that holds your session, and one that lives for a few minutes while you sign in. hangarflying.com sets its own session cookie and the Google Analytics cookie.

Anthropic. When you ask the service to read a data plate, a logbook page, or a manual, that image or page is sent to Anthropic’s Claude to be read, and the reading comes back. Nothing about you goes with it: no name, no email, no account. Anthropic’s commercial terms do not allow it to use what is sent to train its models. Nothing read this way is treated as a record; the page you uploaded stays the record.

Public sources. To look things up the service sends aircraft, engine and propeller identifiers, such as a registration or a model, to the FAA registry, the Federal Register, regulations.gov, and manufacturers’ public websites. What comes back is public data, and the service keeps a dated copy of it.

Hosting and email. The service runs on Amazon Web Services in Ohio, in the United States. Email is sent through Amazon’s mail service.

Crash reports. When something breaks, the service tells Sentry which page and which build. No request body, no headers, no cookies and no query strings are sent, so nothing of yours goes with a crash report.

Stripe. Paid features at hangarflying.com are charged through Stripe. Your card details go to Stripe and never reach our servers; we keep the invoice.

Our own advertising. Panel designs and the exports made from them may appear in Hangar Flying’s own advertising and on its own pages, with your name, your aircraft’s registration and anything else that identifies you removed first, unless you have asked for the credit. Tell us and yours will not be used.

Nobody else. We do not sell what we hold, and we do not share it with advertising networks.

• Your sign-in link, and a confirmation when you change your address.
• Notices about what is coming due on your aircraft, and about new directives.
• For a shop’s customer: that their records can be seen, that the shop recommends work, and what was decided about it.
• A note if the account has not been used for a long time, before it is closed.

Your account’s records are visible to you, and to the other people using a shop account. A customer whose email a shop entered can see their own aircraft’s records, read-only. The administrators who run the service can see accounts in order to run it and to answer a report; they do not read your records except to fix a problem you reported or the system flagged.

While your account is open, everything stays. Closing the account hides it and holds it through a waiting window, reopenable the whole time. After that window an administrator can remove the account for good.

Maintenance entries you signed are not removed with the account. A signature is part of the record, and 14 CFR 91.417 requires the record to be kept and 14 CFR 91.419 requires it to go with the aircraft when it is sold. Your name, email and certificate number are cleared from the account; the signature text on each entry stays as it was made.

A sign-in session lasts ninety days, or twelve hours on a shared computer. A sign-in link lasts minutes. Backups are taken every night, encrypted, held privately, and expire after ninety days, so something removed can persist in a backup for up to that long.

• Export everything in your account as one plain-text file, any time.
• Change the email you sign in with; the new address gets a confirmation first.
• Correct anything you entered. A signed entry is corrected by a new entry.
• Close your account, and ask for it to be removed once the waiting window has run.

All of these are in Manage my account, under your name in the menu. For anything else, use Tell us what goes wrong.

Every connection is encrypted. On the maintenance records service there are no passwords to steal, sessions are held on the server so signing out ends a session everywhere at once, and no script from anybody else runs on its pages. The servers are firewalled and backups are encrypted.

The service is not directed at children under thirteen, and we do not knowingly hold information about them.

When these words change, the date under the title changes with them and What’s new at the foot of the Guide says what changed. A change that matters is also emailed.

See also the terms of service.