Aircraft Registry Airports

Privacy Policy

Last updated September 15, 2026

Short Version

AviHawk doesn't run ad trackers or analytics, doesn't track you across other apps or websites, and doesn't sell your data. On the website, aircraft registry lookups and airport weather work with no account at all. The AviHawk app for iPhone and iPad needs an account. We collect what's needed to run the features you actually use, described below, and nothing for advertising.

What We Log

Like any web service, our servers record standard request logs: IP address, requested URL, timestamp, user agent, and referrer. They're used only to operate and secure AviHawk (debugging, abuse and attack detection). Traffic to the website and the app passes through Cloudflare, which protects and delivers it and handles that same request data on our behalf.

On The Website

If you use the website without an account, preferences like temperature and wind units and "favorited" tail numbers are kept in your browser's local storage, not sent to our server. Clearing your browser data removes them. If you sign in on the website, a session cookie keeps you signed in; it isn't used for tracking or advertising.

Your Account

We store your username, email address, name, and password — the password only ever as a one-way bcrypt hash, never in a form we could read back. We also store what you choose to add: bio, profile photo, home airport, time zone, language and unit preferences, ratings, flight review and medical dates, and personal minimums. In the app, you stay signed in through a token kept in your device's secure keychain.

Your email is used for account purposes only: verification, password resets, notification emails you can turn off, and message copies a school you belong to chooses to email to its members. We don't send marketing email and don't share your email address with anyone else.

Location (App)

The Traffic tab uses your device's precise location, only while you're using the app and only after you allow it. The app sends your coordinates to our server, which uses them to ask FlightAware for aircraft positions in the surrounding area. We don't store your location, keep a history of it, or link it to your account; our server only keeps a short-lived cache of results for a map area, not for a person. Everything else in the app works without location, and you can turn it off at any time in iOS Settings.

Documents And Photos

You can upload documents such as pilot and medical certificates, insurance cards, and proof of a rating, plus a profile photo and photos attached to squawks. Documents and squawk photos are stored privately and are never publicly accessible. Your documents are visible only to you, except that proof you send to verify an instructor, IA, or mechanic rating is reviewed by AviHawk staff. Your profile photo is shown on your profile. A squawk photo is visible to the members of that aircraft's school who can see its squawks.

Messages, Blocking And Reports

We store the messages you send in direct conversations, group conversations, and school group chats so we can deliver them. They're visible to the people in that conversation. School administrators and instructors can choose to email a copy of a school message to its recipients.

If you block someone, we store that so it can be enforced. If you report a user or a message, we store your report together with the content it concerns, review it, and may remove content or suspend accounts as a result.

Flight And School Records

We store the logbook entries, flight plans, aircraft profiles, and saved airports and aircraft you create. If you belong to a flight school or club, we also store what you and the school record there — reservations, instructor availability, training records, maintenance items, squawks, Hobbs and tach readings, signed forms, and billing — and these are visible to you and to the school's staff according to their role.

Push Notifications

If you allow notifications, the app registers your device's push token and model name with us so we can send the notifications you've turned on. They're delivered through Expo's push service and the Apple Push Notification service. You can turn notifications off in the app or in iOS Settings.

Deleting Your Account

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from inside the AviHawk app: Profile → Settings → Delete Account. You don't need to email anyone, and it takes effect immediately.

What is deleted. Your login and password, your email address, your name, bio, home airport, currency dates and personal minimums, your profile photo, your ratings and their proof documents, your uploaded documents, your saved aircraft profiles and fleet, your saved airports, your flight plans, your notification settings and push registrations, and your own pilot logbook. Your school memberships end.

What is kept, and why. Some records aren't ours or yours alone to erase, so they remain with your identity removed from your account but retained on the record itself:

  • Flight training records held by a school — enrolments, graded lessons, and signed endorsements. A flight instructor is required to keep a record of endorsements they issue (14 CFR 61.189), and a certificated school must keep its students' training records. These stay with the school, showing the name recorded at the time.
  • Financial records — payments, top-ups and balances at a school, kept for the school's accounting and tax obligations. Stripe retains its own record of the payment independently.
  • Aircraft maintenance records — squawks you reported, maintenance you completed, and Hobbs/tach readings you recorded. These form an aircraft's airworthiness history and belong to the aircraft's owner and operator, not to your account.
  • Messages you sent — the other person keeps their own copy of your conversation; you appear as a deleted user.

Your account itself is not recoverable, and the retained records above are not linked back to you: we do not keep a mapping from them to your deleted account, your email address, or any other way of identifying you.

If you are the only administrator of a flight school, the app will ask you to hand that school to another administrator first, so its students and instructors aren't left without one.

Aircraft Registry Data

Search results for U.S. tail numbers can include a registered owner's name, city, and state. This is not information we collect about you — it's public record data published by the FAA in its Releasable Aircraft Database, which we mirror and display as-is. If you're an aircraft owner and want your information withheld, that's handled directly through the FAA's own privacy procedure under 49 U.S.C. §44114(b), not through this site.

Third-Party Services

These services receive data from AviHawk only as needed to provide the feature named:

  • Weather: NOAA's Aviation Weather Center (aviationweather.gov) and Open-Meteo. Our server requests airport weather by airport code; the app also requests some forecasts from these services directly, so they see your device's IP address.
  • NOTAMs: the FAA's NOTAM service, requested by our server. It receives no information about you.
  • Aircraft positions and flight history: FlightAware and adsb.lol, requested by our server with a tail number, an aircraft code, or a map area — never anything that identifies you.
  • Airport data: OurAirports.
  • Maps: map tiles from OpenStreetMap, FAA aeronautical charts served by Esri ArcGIS, weather radar from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, and the map software from unpkg. The app loads these directly, so they see your device's IP address.
  • Email: Resend, which receives your email address and the message only to deliver it.
  • Payments: Stripe, including Stripe Billing for school and club plans (see Payments below).
  • Subscriptions: RevenueCat and Apple (see AviHawk Pro Subscriptions below).
  • Push notifications: Expo and Apple (see Push Notifications above).
  • Network: Cloudflare (see What We Log above).

Payments

If you pay a school through AviHawk, your card details go directly to Stripe, Inc., our payment processor — they're entered into Stripe's own secure form and never pass through or get stored on our server. We only store the resulting transaction record: amount, description, timestamp, and Stripe's reference ID for it, not your card number. Stripe's own privacy policy governs how they handle your payment details.

A school's admins can see the transaction history for their own school, including which of their members made which payment, since that's necessary for them to run their billing. We don't share your payment activity with any other school, or with anyone outside AviHawk and Stripe.

If you're a school admin connecting a Stripe account to accept payments, Stripe collects business and identity verification information (business details, banking information, and identity documents) directly from you during their own onboarding flow — we never see or store that information ourselves.

A school or club's own AviHawk plan is billed to the school through Stripe Billing. The admin who subscribes enters the school's payment details into Stripe's own form, and they never reach our server. We store Stripe's customer and subscription references for the school, the plan's status, the date it's paid through, whether it's set to cancel, and the number of aircraft billed.

AviHawk Pro Subscriptions

If you subscribe to AviHawk Pro, you buy it through Apple's App Store, and Apple handles the payment: we never see your payment card or your Apple ID details. The app uses RevenueCat, Inc. to manage the subscription. RevenueCat receives an account identifier of the form "avihawk-" followed by your AviHawk account number, which contains no name or email address, together with the purchase and subscription status Apple reports (the product, purchase and expiry dates, and whether it will renew). The RevenueCat software in the app also sends basic technical details needed to process the purchase, such as your device's IP address, app version, and App Store country. RevenueCat doesn't receive your payment card details. RevenueCat's own privacy policy governs how it handles this.

Our server asks RevenueCat whether your subscription is active and stores the answer on your account: whether you have Pro, the date it's current until, and the product. If you get Pro through a school or club plan instead, nothing about it is stored on your account; it's worked out from your membership.

Children

AviHawk isn't directed to children, and you must be at least 13 years old to create an account.

Changes

If this policy changes, the "last updated" date above will change with it.

Contact

Questions about this policy: [email protected]. To delete your account, use Profile → Settings → Delete Account in the app — see above.