Data handling and privacy
What this site records about you, how long it keeps it, and how to stop it or take it with you.
Who runs this
vHangar is an independently run hobby project for virtual flying clubs. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by VATSIM, IVAO, fshub, or any other network or service whose data it reads. Those names appear here only to describe where flight data comes from.
What is recorded, and where it comes from
Both VATSIM and IVAO publish their live traffic openly, without authentication. When a club adds a CID or VID to its roster, this site reads that pilot's public activity from those feeds and reconstructs the flight.
- Flight data. Position, altitude, groundspeed, callsign, aircraft type, the departure and arrival filed or inferred, and the remarks section of the flight plan. Remarks are free text typed by a human, so they are treated as flight data: shown on the flight's own page and included in exports, never indexed for search across clubs.
- Account data, only if you sign in. The identifier and display name given by whichever provider you used — Discord, VATSIM or IVAO. No password is ever seen or stored.
- Club material. Rosters, logos, and any API token a club owner supplies for its own feeds. Tokens are encrypted at rest and never shown again after they are entered.
There is no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party tracking of any kind. The only cookie is a signed session cookie, set when you sign in and used for nothing else.
How long it is kept
- Tracks — the minute-by-minute path of a flight — are deleted after 90 days. Older flights keep their summary and lose their line on the map.
- Flight summaries are kept indefinitely. A logbook that quietly forgets is not a logbook, and that is the point of the site.
- The networks' own published feeds are kept for 14 days, where this deployment keeps them at all. These are the files VATSIM and IVAO publish openly every minute, saved as sent. Nothing is read out of them that is not already read live; they exist so that a flight recorded wrongly can be checked against what the network actually said, rather than against our reading of it. They are deleted a fortnight later, whole days at a time.
Being recorded without asking for it
This site records every pilot flying on the networks it watches, not only the members of the clubs hosted here. If you fly on VATSIM or IVAO, your public flights are recorded here whether or not you have an account and whether or not any club has heard of you.
A flight recorded this way that no club counted is deleted automatically after 90 days, together with the pilot record it hangs from.
A flight that a club did count is kept indefinitely, because it is that club's own record of its flying — the same as for a member, and whether or not you ever joined. Filing a club's tag is what makes a flight theirs. If you would rather that did not happen, opting out stops the recording and erases what is already here.
A club owner can also add any CID or VID, and the platform will then record that person's public flying. The data is public, but that does not make it invisible, so:
- an entry added by hand is marked unclaimed until the person signs in and confirms it;
- your own page lists every club currently recording your flights;
- one button on that page stops it everywhere and deletes what was recorded — every flight, track and club credit, on every network. It cannot be undone, so export first if you want to keep it.
You do not need an account to be left alone. If a club added your CID or VID and you have never signed in here, write to [email protected] with the network and the number. We stop recording you, delete what was recorded, and mark the identity so that a club re-adding it later does not start it again. You do not have to create an account on a site you did not want to be on in the first place.
Taking your data, or having it removed
- Export your own logbook at any time as CSV, JSON, or GeoJSON tracks.
- To have data removed, write to [email protected], or use the button on your own page if you have an account. Removal covers flights, tracks, remarks and account records, and is permanent.
Changes
This page describes the system as it currently behaves. If what is recorded or how long it is kept changes, this page changes with it.