Privacy policy

Aviators.co is a community-first airfield discovery service for European general aviation. For the purposes of GDPR, the data controller is the Aviators.co team. You can reach us about anything in this policy — including exercising your rights — at privacy@aviators.co.

We run our own infrastructure on servers located in the European Union. We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for advertising.

You can browse airfields, search, and view weather without an account, so for many visitors the only data we process is the technical information below. If you create an account and contribute, we also process the account and content data described further down.

• Server logs. When you visit the site, our servers automatically record technical information needed to operate and secure the service — your IP address, the page or API endpoint requested, timestamp, response status, referrer, and user-agent string. These logs are structured and short-lived (see retention below).
• Anonymous usage analytics. We use Umami, a privacy-friendly analytics tool we host ourselves, to understand how the site is used in aggregate — which pages are popular, approximate visitor counts, referring sites, and broad device / browser / country breakdowns. Umami does not use cookies, does not store any identifier on your device, and does not track you across other websites. It briefly processes your IP address and user-agent on our own servers to derive these anonymous, aggregated statistics and a non-reversible daily visit hash; we do not retain them in a form that identifies you. If your browser sends a "Do Not Track" signal, your visit is not recorded.
• Anything you send us. If you email us, we keep the contents of that correspondence to respond and for our records.
• Your account. If you sign up, we process your email address and the credentials used to authenticate you (handled by our self-hosted authentication service), plus any profile details you choose to add — display name, home base, total flight hours, ratings and licences, your preferred units, and your privacy settings.
• What you contribute. When you post to the community, we store the content you submit — reviews and ratings, photos, edits to an airfield's details, fee reports (the charges you paid and the aircraft type they applied to), and the airfields on your trip lists and flightbag. Photos are stripped of embedded metadata (including any EXIF GPS location) when you upload them, and contributions are reviewed for moderation.

• To run and secure the site. Server logs let us deliver pages, diagnose errors, prevent abuse, and protect against attacks. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in operating a reliable, secure service (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).
• To understand and improve the site. Aggregate, cookieless analytics show us what's useful and what to improve, without profiling individual visitors. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in understanding and improving the service (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)). Because the analytics set no cookies and store no personal data, they do not require your consent.
• To respond to you. If you contact us, we use your message to reply. Legal basis: legitimate interest, or steps taken at your request.
• For accounts and contributions. We process your account and submission data to provide your account, publish the content you choose to share, and moderate it. Legal basis: performance of our terms with you (Art. 6(1)(b)) and our legitimate interest in a trustworthy, well-moderated community (Art. 6(1)(f)).

Browsing Aviators.co sets no cookies at all. For analytics we use a cookieless, self-hosted tool (Umami, described in section 2) that stores nothing on your device, so simply reading the site does not place tracking cookies or share your activity with third-party advertisers.

When you sign in, we set a small number of strictly necessary cookies to keep you signed in and protect your session. These are essential to a feature you actively choose to use (signing in), are not readable by JavaScript, and do not track you across other sites — so they do not require consent. We set no non-essential or advertising cookies; if we ever introduced any, we would ask for your consent through a cookie banner before setting them.

We do not sell your personal data and we keep sharing to a minimum. We rely on a small set of providers strictly to operate the service — for example, hosting and infrastructure on our own EU-based servers. Our web analytics (Umami) is self-hosted on that same infrastructure, so your usage data is not shared with any third-party analytics provider. Any provider that processes personal data on our behalf does so under a data-processing agreement and only on our instructions.

The aviation data, map tiles, and weather you see are drawn from upstream sources (OurAirports, OpenAIP, OpenStreetMap, and the NOAA Aviation Weather Center). We fetch and cache this data server-side; we do not pass your personal data to these sources when you browse. We may also disclose data where required by law.

Aviators.co is self-hosted on servers located in the European Union, and we keep your data within the EU. If that ever changes, or if a provider involves a transfer outside the EU/EEA, we will ensure an appropriate safeguard (such as an adequacy decision or Standard Contractual Clauses) is in place and update this policy.

We keep personal data only as long as we need it for the purposes above:

• Server logs are retained for a short period (typically up to 30 days) for security and troubleshooting, then deleted or anonymised.
• Correspondence is kept for as long as needed to handle your query and a reasonable period afterwards for our records.
• Account and submitted content are kept while your account is active. To close your account, email us (see section 8) and we will erase your profile and personal data; published community contributions may be retained in anonymised form so the shared information remains useful.

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• access the personal data we hold about you;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data erased ("right to be forgotten");
• restrict or object to certain processing;
• receive your data in a portable, machine-readable format; and
• withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent.

To exercise any of these — including getting a copy of your data or closing your account — email us at privacy@aviators.co. We will respond within one month.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority if you believe we have not handled your data properly.

We protect the service with encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS), access controls, and regular backups. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable technical and organisational measures to safeguard your data and will notify you and the relevant authority of a breach where the law requires it.

Aviators.co is intended for pilots and aviation enthusiasts and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

As Aviators.co grows and adds features, we will update this policy and revise the "last updated" date above. Material changes that affect your rights will be communicated clearly. Continuing to use the site after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Questions, requests, or concerns about your privacy? Email privacy@aviators.co. You can also read more about our data sources or about the project.