Privacy policy

Who we are

Known Aviation is run by Known Aviation LLC (“we”). This policy covers KnownTail (knowntail.com), the Known Aviation site (knownaviation.com) and the KnownFlight, KnownPilot and KnownFleet sites (knownflight.com, knownpilot.com, knownfleet.com). Questions or requests: privacy@knowntail.com.

The short version

• We never sell your personal information or use it for advertising.
• Aircraft pages show public FAA records, but never an owner’s street address.
• What you add privately (claims, flight logs, sale prices) stays private.
• Every email we send can be stopped with one click.
• Email privacy@knowntail.com to get a copy of your data or have it deleted.

Public aircraft records

KnownTail’s aircraft pages are built from public records published by the FAA (the aircraft registry and Airworthiness Directives), the NTSB (accident and incident reports) and the FAA’s Service Difficulty Reports. The registry includes the registered owner’s name and address.

• We show the owner’s name, city and state. We never show a street address on our sites.
• Owners can ask us to hide their name at knowntail.com/privacy-request. Verified owners can hide it themselves.

Your account

• You sign in to KnownTail with a link we email you (it works once and expires after 5 minutes) or with Google. We keep your email address, your name if you give it, and whether your email is confirmed. With Google we receive your name, email and profile picture, and keep Google’s sign-in tokens encrypted.
• Each signed-in session keeps the IP address and browser it started from, for security. Sessions last 7 days and are deleted a day after they end.
• If someone logged a flight with you by name and email before you had an account, those flights are linked to your account when you first sign in with that email.

Email

• Alerts about an aircraft or a model start only after you confirm your email address.
• Every alert, digest and waitlist email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and supports your email app’s own unsubscribe button.
• We send email through Resend. Replies go to our support address and are read by people.

My Hangar

• Claiming an aircraft is private: nobody else sees that you claimed it, and claiming doesn’t change its public page.
• We keep the reminders and dates you enter (annual, registration and other due items) to email your reminders and build your private calendar feed. Anyone with your calendar feed’s link can read it, so share it with care.
• If the FAA record shows the aircraft changed hands, we ask whether it’s still yours. With no answer after 30 days, we stop tracking it for you.

Verified Owner

By mail. We send a postcard with a one-time code to the address on the aircraft’s current FAA registration, through our mailing provider, Lob. We use the address only to print and mail that card. We don’t show it, store it with your request, or use it for anything else. Codes expire after 60 days.

With an ID. Stripe checks a photo of your government ID and a selfie for us, and keeps those images under its own privacy policy. We receive only whether the check passed and the name on the ID, which we compare once with the name on the FAA registration. We keep the result and the FAA name it matched, not the details on your ID.

What verified owners publish. Descriptions, equipment, times, notes and photos a verified owner adds appear on the aircraft’s public page. Photos are re-saved without their location and camera details. If the FAA record later shows a new owner, the former owner’s content leaves the page right away, they get a private link to download it for 90 days, and then it’s deleted.

Disputes. If you report that a verified owner isn’t right, we keep your explanation, the email you give (if any) and a one-way code made from your connection. Only our staff see it, the owner is never told who reported, and we email you the outcome if you left an address.

Mail to aircraft owners

We may mail the registered owner of an aircraft, at the address on its FAA registration, about the aircraft’s free record on KnownTail. The address is used only to print and mail the card through Lob, and isn’t stored with the mailing or shown anywhere. Each card has a one-time code to claim the aircraft. To stop this mail, enter the code or the N-number and ZIP code at knowntail.com/mail-opt-out, and we won’t mail that aircraft’s owner again.

Reported sale prices

If you report what an aircraft sold for, we keep the price, sale date, your role in the sale, any hours you add and your email address, which we use only to confirm the report. Reports are private: we use them only in aggregate to improve estimated values and never show or share one on its own. Reports that are never confirmed are deleted after 30 days.

Flight log

• An aircraft’s flight log is seen only by the people its owners invite. Renters see only their own flights.
• If you lose signal while logging, the draft stays on your phone until it’s saved.
• When you use Read the panel, your photo is sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to read the Hobbs and tach numbers. We don’t store the photo. We keep the numbers it read, how sure it was and whether you changed them, to improve the reading. Anthropic doesn’t use this data to train its models.

KnownFlight, KnownPilot, KnownFleet and knownaviation.com

• Waitlists. We keep your email, the role you pick and the few details the form asks for (such as your school’s name and size). We email you only after you confirm, only about that product, and one click unsubscribes.
• Design-partner applications. We keep your name, email, phone number and your answers about your school, to decide and follow up.
• Contact form and demo feedback. What you send is emailed to us and isn’t stored on our sites.
• The KnownFlight demo keeps you signed in with a cookie for 30 days. Nothing you type in the demo is saved.

Analytics, cookies and errors

• We use PostHog (US) to count page views and actions such as searches and sign-ups. It sets a first-party cookie and uses your browser’s storage to tell visits apart, but we don’t tie it to your name or email. We don’t record sessions, and we remove what you type in search boxes and the N-numbers you look up before anything is sent.
• We count views of each aircraft page per day, without storing anything about the visitor.
• We use Sentry to find errors. Error reports leave out cookies and the parts of web addresses after the “?”.
• Other cookies and storage: the sign-in cookie, the demo cookie and flight-log drafts. We use no advertising or cross-site tracking, so there’s no cookie banner.

Abuse protection

To limit spam and abuse, we turn your connection’s IP address into a one-way code that can’t be turned back into the address. We store that code with rate limits and with some forms (reports, requests, sign-ups). We don’t store raw IP addresses, except with signed-in sessions and the limits on sign-in attempts, as described under Your account.

Service providers

These companies process data for us, only to run our sites. We share nothing with anyone else, except when the law requires it.

• Vercel: hosts our sites and sees each request, including your IP address.
• Neon: our database.
• Cloudflare: stores and serves verified owners’ photos.
• Trigger.dev: runs our scheduled jobs, such as alerts and data imports.
• Resend: sends our email.
• PostHog: analytics, as described above.
• Sentry: error reports, as described above.
• Stripe: ID checks for Verified Owner.
• Lob: prints and mails postcards to aircraft owners.
• Anthropic: reads panel photos and helps match Airworthiness Directives.
• Google: sign-in, if you choose it.
• IndexNow (search engines): only the addresses of public pages that changed.

How long we keep things

• Sign-in links: 5 minutes. Sessions: 7 days, deleted a day after they end.
• Verification postcard codes: 60 days.
• Unconfirmed sale-price reports: 30 days.
• A former owner’s photos and page content: 90 days after the ownership change.
• Everything else, such as your account, claims, flight logs and form submissions: until you ask us to delete it or we no longer need it. We’re adding automatic deletion dates and will update this list.

Your choices

• Unsubscribe from any email with its one-click link.
• Hide your name on an aircraft page at knowntail.com/privacy-request.
• Stop mail about your aircraft at knowntail.com/mail-opt-out.
• Get a copy of your data, correct it or have it deleted: email privacy@knowntail.com from the address on your account. We answer within 30 days. This includes requests under state privacy laws, such as California’s.

Children

Our sites aren’t meant for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their information. If you think a child has given us information, email us and we’ll delete it.

Security

All our sites use HTTPS. Sign-in links and codes are stored only as one-way codes, Google’s tokens are encrypted, and only a few people at Known Aviation can reach your data. No system is perfectly secure; if something goes wrong, we’ll tell you as the law requires.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, we update the date at the top. If a change matters to how we use your information, we’ll email account holders before it takes effect.

Contact

Email privacy@knowntail.com with any question or request about your information.