Privacy Policy

Maintenance Flight is a podcast and reference site for aviation maintenance professionals. This policy explains what this website collects, why, and what you can do about it.

The short version:

• This site sets no cookies of its own, and runs no advertising or tracking scripts. It counts page views with a cookieless analytics tool that cannot identify you.
• The only information you give us is what you type into one of two forms, and using either one is optional.
• We do not sell your information, and we share it only with the service providers listed below that operate this site on our behalf.

Who We Are

This website is operated by Keyran Walsh, referred to below as “we” or “us”, at https://maintenanceflight.com.

If you have a question about this policy, or about information we hold about you, write to keyran [at] mtxflight [dot] com.

What We Collect

There are exactly two places on this site where you can submit information, and neither is required in order to read or listen.

• Contact form: your first name, your email address, and the message you write. That page captures nothing else.
• Episode alerts signup: your first name, your email address, and a record that you ticked the agreement box, so we can show that you asked to be added.
• Automatically, on every request: your IP address, browser user-agent, the referring page, and the date and time. These are ordinary web server logs kept by our hosting provider.
• For spam prevention only: your IP address is sent to Cloudflare when you submit the contact form, and stored very briefly by Upstash when you submit the signup form. Both are described under “Service Providers” below.
• For visitor statistics: which page was viewed, the site that linked you here, and your browser, operating system, device type and country. Your IP address is used to work these out and is then discarded rather than stored. This is described in full under “Cookies, Analytics, and Tracking” below.

Cookies, Analytics, and Tracking

This website sets no cookies of its own, and stores nothing in your browser’s local or session storage. It runs one analytics tool, Umami, and that tool was chosen precisely because it needs none of those things. There are no advertising or conversion pixels here, no session recording, and no cross-site tracking of any kind.

Umami tells a repeat visit from a new one without storing anything about you. It takes your IP address and your browser’s user-agent string, combines them with this site’s address and a secret value that is rotated on a schedule, and keeps only the scrambled result. Your IP address is used to derive that result and to resolve an approximate country, and is then discarded — it is never written to the analytics records. Because the secret is rotated, the scrambled result stops matching after a while, so we cannot follow you over time and cannot build a profile of you.

What this leaves us with is a count. We can see how many times a page was viewed, roughly how long a visit lasted, which site linked you here, and the country, browser, operating system and device type of the visit. None of it names you, and none of it is connected to anything you type into either form.

If your browser sends a “Do Not Track” signal, the analytics script stops without recording anything at all.

The only other third-party component that loads in your browser is the Cloudflare Turnstile anti-spam widget, and it appears only on the contact page. Turnstile exists to tell a person apart from an automated script, and Cloudflare states that it is not used for tracking or advertising. It runs inside its own Cloudflare frame, so anything it needs to store belongs to Cloudflare rather than to this site.

Because nothing on this site sets a cookie or stores anything in your browser, there is no cookie banner here and nothing for you to accept or decline.

Why We Use It

We use the information above only for the purpose it was given, as follows. Where a legal basis is required (for example under UK or EU data protection law), the basis we rely on is named alongside each purpose.

• To read and reply to what you send us through the contact form, because you asked us to get in touch, and because we have a legitimate interest in responding to correspondence.
• To send you episode alerts if you signed up for them, on the basis of your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.
• To keep the forms usable by stopping automated spam, which serves our legitimate interest in a working contact form, and yours in reaching a human.
• To keep the site online, secure, and diagnosable through server logs, which serves our legitimate interest in operating the service.
• To see which episodes and pages people actually read, so we know what to make more of, which serves our legitimate interest in understanding our own audience. We rely on a measurement tool that cannot identify you, which is what keeps that interest from overriding your privacy.

Service Providers

We rely on the following providers to run this site. Each handles information on our behalf, and only for the purposes described above.

• Netlify provides hosting, and the system that receives both forms. Form submissions are stored in our Netlify account and emailed to us when they arrive. Netlify also keeps standard server logs. Based in the United States.
• Cloudflare provides the Turnstile anti-spam check on the contact form. When you submit that form, your IP address and signals from your browser are sent to Cloudflare so it can judge whether the submission came from a person. Based in the United States.
• Umami provides the cookieless visitor statistics described above. When a page loads, your IP address and browser user-agent are sent to Umami, used to produce the scrambled result and the country, and then discarded rather than stored. Umami is open-source software run as a hosted service; our account is on its United States infrastructure.
• Upstash provides the short-lived store behind the signup form’s rate limit, which prevents the same address submitting repeatedly in quick succession. It holds a record derived from your IP address for roughly one minute, after which it expires automatically. The database is hosted in Canada and may be replicated to other regions.

What We Do Not Do

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for anyone else’s advertising. We do not publish the contents of messages sent through the contact form. We disclose personal information outside the providers listed above only where we are legally required to, such as in response to a valid legal request, or where it is necessary to protect the safety or rights of a person.

How Long We Keep It

We keep information only as long as it is useful for the purpose it was given, and no longer.

• Contact messages are kept in our Netlify Forms account for up to 24 months, then deleted.
• Episode alert signups are kept until you unsubscribe or ask to be removed.
• Spam rate-limiting records expire automatically about one minute after the request that created them.
• Visitor statistics are kept by Umami for six months and are then deleted. They are counts rather than records about a person, and nothing in them points back to you.
• Server logs are retained by our hosting provider according to its own schedule, which we do not control.

Where Your Information Goes

The providers listed above are based in, or store data in, the United States and Canada. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, your information will therefore be transferred outside your country.

For those transfers we rely on the safeguards each provider has put in place, including the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, which they incorporate through their data processing agreements. You can ask us for details of the arrangements covering your information.

We do not treat your use of this website as consent to that transfer.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights over the information we hold about you:

• To ask what we hold, and to receive a copy of it.
• To have inaccurate information corrected.
• To have your information deleted.
• To object to, or ask us to restrict, how we use it.
• To receive it in a portable form.
• To withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent. Withdrawing consent does not affect anything done before you withdrew it.

How to Exercise Your Rights

Write to keyran [at] mtxflight [dot] com and tell us what you would like us to do. We will respond within 30 days. If you are unhappy with our response, you may complain to your local data protection authority.

Email and Unsubscribing

If you sign up for episode alerts, we email you when a new episode is published. We do not send anything else to that list, and we do not pass the list to anyone.

Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes effect immediately. You can also ask to be removed by writing to keyran [at] mtxflight [dot] com.

Children

This site is aimed at working aviation maintenance professionals and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has sent us information, write to us and we will delete it.

Changes to This Policy

We will update this page whenever the site changes what it collects or who processes it. The date shown at the top of this page is the date of the most recent change.

If a change materially affects information you gave us on the basis of consent, we will tell you by email rather than relying on a silent update. We do not treat your continued use of the site as acceptance of a new policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent to keyran [at] mtxflight [dot] com. You are welcome to use the contact form instead, bearing in mind that the form itself collects information as described above.