Privacy Policy

Pilot Quest is operated by Charlie Golf Aviation, LLC. For any question about this policy, or to exercise any of the rights in clause 9, write to chad@3dchad.com.

We are based in the United States and the services we use to run Pilot Quest store data in the United States. If you use the site from elsewhere, your information is transferred there.

Almost everything here is something you entered or imported. We do not buy data about you, and we do not collect anything about your flying from any source other than you.

• Your account. Your email address, and either a password (stored only as a hash by our authentication provider — we never see it) or the fact that you sign in with Google. If you sign in with Google we receive your name, email address and profile picture; the picture is copied into our own storage once, at first sign-in, so that we are not loading an image from Google every time somebody views your profile.
• Your profile. Your handle, display name, an optional real name, an optional bio, an avatar, an optional home airport, a pilot class, and your privacy settings.
• Your logbook. For each flight: the date, the departure and arrival airports, an optional route, the aircraft, total time, night time, actual instrument time, day and night landings, distance, and whether the entry was typed in or imported.
• Your aircraft. Registration, an optional nickname, the type, how the aircraft is classified (gear, engine, complex, high performance and so on), and an optional photograph.
• What you tell us about yourself. Certificates and ratings you tick, and milestone counts you type in — the numbers that cannot be worked out from a logbook.
• What we calculate. Your achievements, experience points, level, rank and summary statistics. These are derived from the three categories above and are recomputed when they change; they are not a separate thing we collect.
• Your invitation. While Pilot Quest is invite-only, we record the code you used, when it was redeemed, and who issued it. An issuer can label a code with a note about who it is for; that note is written by them, is never shown to you, and is not taken from anything you provide.
• Technical records. Our hosting and database providers keep ordinary server logs — IP address, browser user agent, the page requested and the time — for security, abuse prevention and debugging. We do not build profiles from these and we do not join them to your logbook.

This clause is as much a description of how the site is built as a promise, and each item is checkable by opening the network tab.

• No analytics and no tracking. There is no analytics package, no advertising pixel, no session recorder and no third-party tag of any kind in this site. We do not know which pages you visit beyond what an ordinary server log records.
• No third-party assets. Typefaces are served from our own domain rather than a font network, and the map is drawn from boundary data and terrain images we host ourselves, with no commercial tile provider. Loading a page of Pilot Quest does not tell anybody else that you did.
• No advertising, ever, and no sale of data. We do not sell or share your personal information, and we have no arrangement under which anybody pays us for access to it.
• No live position or device location. Pilot Quest does not ask for location permission, does not receive position reports, and knows only the airports you have written down.
• No payment details. Pilot Quest is free and takes no payments, so there is nothing of that kind to hold.
• Not everything in your logbook file. When you import a ForeFlight export, the file is read in your browser and only the flight fields listed in clause 2 are sent to us. Remarks, instructor names, signatures and endorsement text stay on your machine.

To run your account and show you your own logbook; to score your flights against achievements and keep your statistics current; to draw your map; to place you on the leaderboards described in clause 5; to send you the few emails the service requires — confirming your address, resetting a password; and to keep the service working and secure.

We do not use your logbook to train machine learning models, and we do not send you marketing email.

This is the clause worth reading twice, because it is the one that is about other people rather than about us.

• Private by default. Your profile page, your home airport, your tail numbers and your real name are all hidden until you switch them on. Those are the defaults, not settings you have to go and find.
• Leaderboards show every pilot. Once you have finished setting up your account you appear on the leaderboards under your display name and avatar, together with your experience points, level, badge count, airports and states. This happens whether or not your profile is public — what your privacy setting controls is whether your name is a link to a profile page.
• A leaderboard names your state, never your airport. The regional boards use the state your home airport is in. The airport itself, your bio, your real name and your total hours are not available to that page at all.
• Your public profile is yours to switch on. If you make your profile public it is readable by anyone at pilotquest.net/p/your-handle, signed in or not. It shows what you have earned, and your aircraft — with registrations hidden unless you have turned tail numbers on. Aircraft nicknames are never shown to anybody but you.
• Nobody can read your logbook. Individual flights are visible only to you. Other pilots see what you earned, not where and when you flew.

You can change any of this at any time in Settings, and the change takes effect immediately.

We use no advertising or analytics cookies, so there is nothing here to consent to or opt out of. What we do set:

• Sign-in cookies. Set by our authentication provider to keep you signed in. They are strictly necessary; without them you would have to sign in on every page.
• A site-password cookie. While Pilot Quest is being built there is a shared password over the site. That cookie holds a one-way hash, never the password itself.
• An offline copy of your own data. So that the app works in a hangar with no signal, your recent record is stored in your browser, along with any flights you enter while offline until they can be sent. It is held on your device, checked against the signed-in pilot before it is read, and cleared when you sign out.
• Small preferences. Whether you have muted the celebration sound, and whether you have dismissed the prompt to install the app.

We keep this list short on purpose, and it is complete. Each of these acts on our instructions and stores data in the United States.

• Supabase — the database, sign-in, file storage for avatars and aircraft photographs, and the service emails.
• Vercel — hosting and content delivery for the site itself.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google, and only for that.

We keep your account and everything in it for as long as your account exists, because the whole point of the product is a record that accumulates. Delete your account and your profile, flights, aircraft, photographs and achievements are deleted with it.

Two things survive, and neither identifies you: an invite code stays marked as spent, so that it cannot be handed to somebody else, but it stops recording who spent it; and ordinary server logs age out on our providers’ own schedules.

You can see and correct almost everything we hold from inside the app: your profile and privacy settings in Settings, and every flight in your logbook, which you can edit or delete one at a time. For anything else — a copy of your data, deletion of your account, or a question about how something is used — write to chad@3dchad.com and we will respond within 30 days.

If you are in California, you have the right to know what personal information we collect and why, to correct it, to delete it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information and we do not offer financial incentives in exchange for it, so there is nothing to opt out of — but the rights to know, correct and delete apply, and exercising them will never cost you anything or degrade the service.

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, we process your account and logbook to provide the service you asked for, and our server logs on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping it secure. You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, and may complain to your local supervisory authority.

Pilot Quest is not intended for anyone under 16, and accounts are limited to people of 16 and over by the Terms of Service. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us and we will delete it.

Every table in our database carries row-level security, so a pilot can read their own rows and nothing else; the handful of things that are public — the leaderboards, a public profile — are served through narrow views that expose only the columns clause 5 describes. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider and are never visible to us.

No service can promise perfect security, and we will not. If we ever discover a breach affecting your data we will tell you, and we will tell you what actually happened.

When this policy changes the date at the top changes with it. If a change materially affects what we collect or who can see it, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, rather than relying on you to notice a date.

Charlie Golf Aviation, LLC — chad@3dchad.com. See also the Terms of Service.