Privacy Policy

Volo is used in two ways:

• By an organisation (a flight school or charter operator), which invites its staff, pilots, students and customers.
• By an independent flight instructor (a "practice"), who invites their own students and clients.

When an organisation or practice uses Volo to manage its people, the organisation or practice decides what information goes into Volo about them and why. For that information, Volo acts as a service provider / processor on the organisation's or practice's behalf, and the organisation or practice is responsible for its own use of it. For information we collect for our own purposes (for example, running your account, billing for Volo's own subscription, security, website visit counts and responding to demo requests), Volo is responsible.

If you are a student, pilot or customer of a flight school or instructor and you have a question about how they use your information, contact them first. You can also contact us at any time using the details in Section 13.

Information you or your organisation give us

• Account and contact details: your name, email address, phone and mobile number, postal address, and emergency contact name, email and phone.
• Pilot and certificate information: pilot certificate type and number, ratings and endorsements held and their dates, flight review and training dates, date of birth, and instructor certificate details.
• Medical certificate information (health data): your FAA medical certificate class, the date of your last medical examination, the calculated expiry dates, and any scan or photo of the certificate you or your organisation upload. See Section 4.
• Identity and insurance documents you upload, such as a passport, pilot certificate or insurance certificate, and, if they are read automatically, the details read from them (for example policy number, provider and expiry date).
• Training and aviation records: training records, lesson notes, endorsements (including the instructor's signature details), logbook entries and aircraft logbook scans.
• Scheduling and flight operations: reservations, availability, dispatch and check-in records, Hobbs and tach times and photos of those meters, and aircraft you fly or own.
• Billing and payment records: charges for aircraft rental and instruction, invoices, and your account balance with the organisation or instructor. Where an organisation accepts card payments through Volo, or where an organisation or instructor pays for Volo, the card is entered directly into Stripe's own payment form. Volo never receives or stores your full card number or security code. We do keep the payment records Stripe sends us, which can include the payer's name, email address, phone number and billing address, the amount, and whether the payment succeeded. See Section 5.
• Safety reports you submit to an organisation, including the narrative, attachments and, unless you choose to file anonymously, your name and email. An anonymous report stores no name, email or link to your account, and it cannot carry attachments, because an uploaded file records who uploaded it. We check that you belong to the organisation when you file it, but we do not record who you are. Safety reporting is not available inside an independent instructor's practice: with one instructor reviewing every report, a report there could not stay anonymous.
• Notes about you written by your instructor or organisation, including instructor notes that are not shown to you.
• Forms a flight school asks you to fill in inside Volo (intake forms). The school chooses the questions, so the answers can include anything the school asks for.
• Enquiries to a flight school made through a school's Volo enquiry form, which may be embedded on the school's own website: your name, email, phone number, message, and the web page or campaign that brought you there. We hold this for the school.
• Your choices about automatic reading: whether you have given or withdrawn permission for your documents to be read automatically, and when.
• Your acceptance of our User Agreement: your name, email, the version you accepted and when.
• Demo requests made on our website: your name, email, organisation and message.

Information collected automatically

• Sign-in and session information needed to keep you signed in, stored on your device.
• Technical logs kept by our hosting and database providers, such as IP address, request time and error details, used to operate and secure the service.
• Abuse protection on public forms. When someone submits a public enquiry form, we keep a one-way scrambled (hashed) form of their IP address to limit repeated submissions.
• Visits to our public marketing web pages (the home page, the pages for businesses and for instructors, and the team page) are counted with Vercel Web Analytics, which does not use cookies. Nothing behind sign-in is counted, and these pages are not part of the iPhone app.

What we do not collect

• We do not collect your device's precise or approximate location.
• We do not use advertising identifiers, advertising networks, or crash-reporting tools, and we do not track you across other companies' apps or websites. The only analytics we use is Vercel Web Analytics, which counts visits to our public marketing pages without cookies (see Section 5).
• We do not sell or "share" (for cross-context behavioural advertising) personal information.
• We do not send text messages.

We use personal information to:

• provide the service your organisation or instructor signed up for: scheduling, dispatch, maintenance, pilot currency and endorsement tracking, training records, billing and safety reporting;
• read uploaded documents and meter photos, where permitted, so you don't have to type in dates, certificate details and meter readings by hand (see Sections 4 and 5);
• process payments: Volo's own subscription fees, and, where an organisation accepts them, payments of that organisation's invoices;
• send you account and service emails, such as invitations, password resets, welcome messages, booking notices, certificate and maintenance expiry reminders, account deletion notices and training records someone chooses to email to you;
• hold enquiries made to a flight school, for that school;
• keep the service secure, prevent misuse, and fix problems;
• count visits to our public marketing pages;
• keep records we are required to keep under aviation regulation and other law;
• respond to your requests and to demo requests.

We do not use your information, including health information, for Volo's own marketing, and we do not use it to build profiles for anyone else.

Messages a school or instructor sends to people who contact them

A flight school or independent instructor that uses Volo can put a Volo inquiry form on its own website. If you submit that form, the school or instructor receives your name, email address, phone number (if you give one) and your message, and Volo stores them on their behalf.

The school or instructor is the sender. They decide whether to contact you, what to say, and when. Volo acts as their service provider (processor): we store your details, send the emails they ask us to send through our email provider, and keep a record of what was sent. We do not use your details for our own marketing, we do not sell them, and we do not "share" them for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not combine them with information from other schools or instructors.

Email. When you submit the form you may get one email confirming that the school or instructor received your inquiry. We send further emails from the school or instructor (for example follow-ups about training) only if you ticked the box on the form that asked for them. Every email carries the school's or instructor's name and postal address and a link that unsubscribes you with one click and no log-in. We act on an unsubscribe immediately, and the link keeps working for at least 30 days after the email is sent.

What we keep. We keep the inquiry, a record of every email sent to you, and a record of your choices: the exact wording you agreed to, the date and time, and the form it came from. We keep the record of your consent for as long as the school or instructor emails you and for four years afterwards, so that they can show you agreed. Unsubscribing does not delete your inquiry; ask the school or instructor, or us, to delete it.

Your choices. You can unsubscribe from any email, withdraw consent at any time, and ask the school or instructor (or us, at the address in Section 13) to see, correct or delete what we hold about you.

Pilots must hold a valid FAA medical certificate to fly, so Volo stores your medical class, examination date, the expiry dates we calculate from them, and any scan of the certificate that is uploaded. We use this only to show you and your organisation or instructor whether your medical is current and when it expires.

We do not use health information for advertising, marketing or data mining, we do not sell it, and we do not share it with anyone except the service providers who process it for us to deliver this feature.

Automatic reading needs your permission. A pilot document you upload, or one a school or instructor uploads for you, is sent to Google to be read only if you have given permission in your Account settings. You are asked; the answer is "no" until you say yes, and you can withdraw it at any time. The permission is the document owner's own: an instructor or school cannot give it for someone else. Your organisation or practice can also switch automatic reading off for everyone, and if either of you has said no, the document is not sent. Without permission the document is still stored, and the details are typed in by hand. Permission covers every kind of pilot document, not only medical certificates, because any uploaded file may contain health information. A document already sent cannot be recalled.

Medical certificate scans are stored in private storage. Each time you or an authorised person at your organisation or practice opens one, Volo creates a link to it that works for five minutes. Do not forward that link: until it expires, anyone who has it can open the file.

If you do not want a scan of your medical certificate stored in Volo, do not upload one: you can enter your medical class and examination date in your profile by hand instead.

Volo is introducing an optional feature that lets a flight instructor record the audio of a lesson and have it turned into a written transcript the instructor can read when writing the student's training record. It may not yet be available to your organisation or instructor.

What is recorded

The audio of a lesson, usually the aircraft intercom, recorded by the instructor on their own phone or computer or uploaded from a recording they made. It can include the voices of the student, the instructor, anyone else on the intercom, and radio traffic. With it we store the lesson date, the student it is about, its length and size, and the transcript.

Consent, and adults only

• Before each recording is uploaded, the instructor must confirm in Volo that they told the student, and everyone else on the intercom, that the lesson would be recorded and how the recording would be used, and that each of them agreed. We keep a dated record of that confirmation, of who made it, and of the names of the other people listed. Volo relies on the instructor's confirmation and cannot check it independently.
• Only adults can be recorded. The instructor must confirm the student is 18 or older, and Volo refuses a recording when a date of birth on file shows the student is under 18.

Who can hear it or read it

In Volo, only the instructor who made the recording can listen to the audio or read the transcript. Other staff of a school, including its managers, cannot, and students do not see the transcript in the app. Nothing is added to a training record automatically.

How it is processed

• The audio is stored privately by Supabase (Section 5) and sent to AssemblyAI, Inc., in the United States, to be transcribed. When transcription finishes and we have fetched the result, we ask AssemblyAI to delete its copy of the audio and the transcript. We also ask it to delete them when consent is withdrawn or the retention period below ends.

How long we keep it

• The audio is deleted 30 days after the instructor signs the training record for that lesson, or 30 days after it was uploaded if no record is signed.
• The transcript text is deleted at the same time as the audio, and so are the quotes and grades suggested from it. A training record the instructor wrote and signed is a separate record and is not changed.
• Withdrawing consent deletes the audio and the transcript straight away (within minutes). The student can ask their instructor, or their school, to withdraw it at any time, or contact us (Section 13). A training record that was already signed is not changed. We keep the record that consent was given and later withdrawn, as evidence.

We share personal information only with the service providers below, who process it on our instructions to run Volo, with Stripe as described below, and with your own organisation or instructor.

Google and your documents. Document, meter-photo and lesson reading runs on Google Cloud's Vertex AI, under Google Cloud's terms for business customers, which do not permit Google to use the content to train its models. Vertex AI is the only Google AI service Volo uses.

Payments. Volo uses Stripe in two ways.

• When an organisation or practice pays for Volo, Volo is the seller and Stripe processes the payment for us.
• When an organisation accepts payments from its own customers through Volo (for example for aircraft rental), the organisation is the seller. The payment goes to the organisation's own Stripe account, not to Volo, and the organisation, not Volo, handles refunds and disputes.

In both cases Stripe also uses payment information for its own purposes, such as fraud prevention and meeting its legal obligations, under its own privacy policy at stripe.com/privacy. Card payments are not offered in the iPhone app.

Calendar subscriptions. If you choose to subscribe to your Volo bookings from a calendar app, that calendar provider fetches your upcoming bookings through a private link: the aircraft, the organisation's name and your instructor's name. Anyone with the link can read it, so do not share it; you can turn it off in Volo.

Your organisation or instructor. If you use Volo through a flight school or an instructor, the people they authorise can see the information about you that their role allows, such as your certificates, medical status, schedule, training records and account balance.

Legal reasons. We may disclose information if required by law, to respond to a valid legal request, to protect the safety of any person, or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, in which case we will tell you.

Volo is a US company, and our service providers may process information in the United States.

Your information is encrypted in transit. Access inside Volo's database is restricted by rules that limit each person to their own organisation's or practice's data. Documents are kept in private storage, but they are reached in the following ways:

• Uploaded pilot documents, such as medical certificates, pilot certificates, passports and insurance certificates, are opened through a link created at the moment an authorised person views them, which expires after five minutes.
• Safety report attachments, aircraft logbook scans, training materials, emergency documents and aircraft photos are opened the same way, through links that expire after one hour or less.

Dropbox and QuickBooks access tokens are stored encrypted and are never sent to your browser. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Organisation logos are stored so that anyone with the image's web address can view it without signing in, because a logo is shown to people who are not yet signed in. The address is long and not listed or searchable, but it contains your organisation's or practice's internal identifier. Do not upload anything as a logo that you would not want to be public.

Aircraft photos, photos of aircraft owned by an independent instructor's students, and every document are private: only signed-in people with access to that organisation or practice can open them, through links that expire.

We keep personal information for as long as your account, or the account of the organisation or practice you belong to, is active, and then as described below.

Deleting your own account

You can delete your account from Account in the app.

• Your request is confirmed, and your organisation's or instructor's administrator and Volo support are notified.
• There is a 7-day grace period, during which you can cancel the request.
• After the grace period, we delete your personal information, except the records described under "Records we must keep" below.

Deleting an organisation or practice

The owner of an organisation or an independent instructor practice can ask us to delete it by contacting us (Section 13).

• When we delete it, we delete the organisation's or practice's data, except the records described under "Records we must keep".
• Students keep read access to their own training records and endorsements after a practice or organisation is deleted, so that they retain proof of their training.

Records we must keep

Some records are aviation records that federal aviation regulations require be kept, and that must not be altered once signed. These include signed endorsements, training records and logbook entries. We keep these records, including the names of the student and the instructor on them, after an account, organisation or practice is deleted, for as long as the law requires.

We may also keep limited information where the law requires it (for example, billing and payment records for tax purposes) or to resolve disputes and enforce our agreements.

Other retention

• Service logs kept by our providers are deleted on their normal schedules. These logs can temporarily contain details processed by our server functions; our document-reading functions record only the shape of what was read, not its contents.
• Records of the emails we send you — recipient address, when it was sent, and its delivery status — are personal data that we keep for compliance and support purposes (see Section 5).
• Payment event records received from Stripe are kept with your billing records.
• Documents and photos read by Google are not kept by Volo beyond the file you uploaded and the extracted details saved to your record; Google's retention is governed by the terms described in Section 5.
• Drafts of safety reports are saved on your device and to your account, so you can finish them on another device, until you submit or discard them. Only you can see your drafts.

• Access and correction. You can view and edit most of your profile in the app. Ask your organisation or instructor, or contact us, to correct anything else.
• Deletion. See Section 9.
• Export. You can ask us for a copy of your information.
• Withdrawing consent. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time:
  • Automatic reading of your pilot documents: in Account, give or withdraw permission, or switch automatic reading off altogether.
  • Automatic reading for an organisation or practice: an administrator can switch it off for every document belonging to the organisation or practice, including aircraft documents, logbook pages and meter photos. For a single logbook upload, turn off the "auto-read" switch first.
  • Camera and photos: turn off Volo's access in iPhone Settings > Volo.
  • Dropbox: an organisation administrator can disconnect Dropbox from the integrations settings at any time; we then delete the stored tokens.
  • QuickBooks: an organisation administrator can disconnect QuickBooks from the integrations settings at any time; we then stop sending and delete the stored tokens. Records already in QuickBooks remain in your QuickBooks company, which is yours to manage.
  • Everything else: delete your account (Section 9) or contact us.

  Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that happened before, or records we must keep by law.

• State privacy rights. Depending on where you live, you may have rights to know, access, correct, delete, and to not be discriminated against for exercising them. We will verify your request before acting on it, and you may use an authorised agent.

If your information is in Volo because of an organisation or instructor, we may pass your request to them, since they control that information.

Organisation owners, administrators and independent instructors must be at least 18.

Volo is not directed at children. Flight schools and instructors may add students who are under 18 to their own accounts; they are responsible for obtaining any parental consent required. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, contact us and we will delete it.

We will post any change on this page and update the "Last updated" date. If a change is material, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Volo Ops, Inc.
8 The Green, Ste A
Dover, DE 19901
United States

Email: operations@voloops.com