IFATC Companion — Privacy Policy

Effective date: June 29, 2026

Last updated: August 22, 2026

Applies to: the IFATC Companion applications for iOS / iPadOS (distributed on the Apple App Store) and for Android (distributed on Google Play, package com.h3consultingpartners.ifatccompanion) — together, "the App", "we", "us", "our".

Published by: H3 Consulting Partners LLC

Privacy contact: [email protected]

This Privacy Policy explains what information the App accesses, how it is used, the limited circumstances in which any information leaves your device, and the third-party services the App relies on. It is written to meet the requirements of both stores: Apple's App Store Review Guidelines and App Privacy ("nutrition label") requirements, and Google Play's User Data policy and Data safety disclosures. The disclosures below are consistent with the Data safety section shown on the App's Google Play listing and with the App Privacy details shown on its App Store listing.

1. Who we are

IFATC Companion is published by H3 Consulting Partners LLC ("the developer"). We are the data controller for the purposes of this policy. If you have any questions about this policy or your privacy, contact us at the address in the Contact section below.

IFATC Companion is an independent companion app. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Infinite Flight Corporation, the Infinite Flight Air Traffic Control (IFATC) program, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the OpenStreetMap Foundation, EUMETNET, NASA, VATSIM or the VATSpy Data Project, SimBrief or Navigraph, the vATIS project / datis.clowd.io, Apple Inc., or Google LLC.

2. Summary of data practices

Google Play Data safety summary: the Android app declares that it does not collect or share any user data, and that it collects no data types in any Play category (location, personal info, financial info, health, messages, photos and videos, audio files, files and docs, calendar, contacts, app activity, web browsing, app info and performance, or device or other IDs). Every internet request the Android app makes uses HTTPS; cleartext traffic is disabled at the platform level by the app's network security configuration. Because no user data is collected, there is no collected data to delete — see Section 8 for how to remove everything stored on your device.

3. Information the App accesses and how it is handled

Where behavior differs between platforms, the paragraph is tagged iOS or Android. Untagged text applies to both.

3.1 Flight and aircraft data from Infinite Flight (local network only)

When you use Live Connected Mode, the App connects to Infinite Flight running on another device on the same local Wi-Fi network using the Infinite Flight Connect API v2 over a direct TCP connection. Over this local connection the App reads your simulated flight data — for example aircraft position, altitude, heading, speed, vertical speed, ground state, flight phase, and your filed flight plan (departure, destination, route fixes, and procedures).

This is simulated flight data from a video game, not your real-world location or travel data. It is exchanged only between your devices on your local network and is never sent to us or to any internet server.

• iOS Discovery uses Bonjour (_infiniteflight._tcp) and a local UDP discovery listener, and iOS asks for your permission to find devices on your local network.
• Android Discovery uses a UDP broadcast listener on your own subnet, declared with INTERNET, ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE, ACCESS_WIFI_STATE, CHANGE_WIFI_MULTICAST_STATE and LOCAL_NETWORK_ACCESS. The app deliberately uses the modern Wi-Fi APIs that do not require a location permission, and it declares no location permission of any kind.

3.2 Microphone and speech recognition (push-to-talk)

The App offers an optional push-to-talk feature so you can speak ATC readbacks and requests instead of tapping buttons. It is off until you use it. When you hold the push-to-talk control, the App captures microphone audio and uses the platform's speech recognizer to transcribe it into text, which is then matched to an action by deterministic, on-device keyword rules. There is no AI or large language model involved.

• The App does not record microphone audio to a file, does not save it, and does not transmit it to the developer or to any server of ours. The recognized text is used transiently to drive the ATC conversation and is then discarded.
• iOS The App requests Apple's on-device speech recognition wherever the device supports it, so audio is processed locally. Where on-device recognition is unavailable, Apple's Speech framework may process the audio using Apple's servers, subject to Apple's Privacy Policy.
• Android The App uses Android's SpeechRecognizer and prefers on-device recognition where the platform provides it. On devices or configurations where the system recognizer falls back to a cloud service, that processing is performed by the recognition service installed on your device (often Google's) under your device's own speech settings and that provider's privacy policy — for Google, the Google Privacy Policy. The App itself neither performs nor receives that processing.

The microphone is used only while you actively hold push-to-talk. The microphone permission is requested at runtime the first time you use the feature, with a plain-language explanation, and you can decline or revoke it at any time — in iOS Settings, or in Android Settings → Apps → IFATC Companion → Permissions. The App remains fully usable with button-based input.

3.3 Weather data requests (internet)

The Weather features fetch aviation weather (METAR, TAF, PIREP, and SIGMET reports) from the NOAA Aviation Weather Center public service at aviationweather.gov. These requests require no API key and no account. To request relevant reports, the App includes airport/station identifiers and, for route weather, route-related parameters derived from your simulated flight plan.

• The requests contain aviation identifiers and simulated route information only — no name, email, account, device identifier, advertising ID, or personal contact information.
• Like any internet request, NOAA may receive your device's IP address and standard request metadata as part of normal network operation. Your use of NOAA's service is subject to NOAA's own policies.
• Weather results are cached on your device so the App can show recent data and reduce requests.

To display precipitation on the weather map, the App may also request radar and satellite precipitation imagery for the map area you are viewing from the following public services:

• NOAA / U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) — radar base-reflectivity precipitation, used in NOAA-covered radar regions (contiguous U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico approximations) and served from mapservices.weather.noaa.gov. Radar precipitation data: NOAA/NWS.
• EUMETNET OPERA — European radar precipitation composites (produced by the CIRRUS production, successor to ODYSSEY), for use where OPERA radar coverage is available (Europe). Where this source is used, the App reads the latest composite anonymously (no account, no API key, no credentials) from the public EUMETNET Open Radar Data (ORD) 24-hour cache served from s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com. Radar precipitation data: EUMETNET OPERA / CIRRUS composite (CC BY 4.0). This source is currently disabled in shipping builds on both iOS and Android — Europe falls back to the NASA satellite estimate below — so current versions make no requests to it. It is disclosed here because the capability exists and may be re-enabled in a future release.
• NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) — a global satellite precipitation estimate (part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System, using GPM IMERG where applicable), used as a fallback outside the radar coverage above.

• These requests contain only the geographic area (map bounding box) being displayed — no name, email, account, device identifier, or personal contact information. The bounding box describes the simulated flight's map view, not your physical whereabouts.
• Like any internet request, these providers may receive your device's IP address and standard request metadata as part of normal network operation. Your use of each service is subject to that provider's own policies.
• These services require no API key and no account.

3.4 Real-world ATIS (D-ATIS) requests (internet)

The ATC features can play the current real-world ATIS (Automatic Terminal Information Service) for your departure and arrival airports. When you tune ATIS, the App fetches the airport's FAA Digital ATIS (D-ATIS) text from the free, public, keyless community endpoint at datis.clowd.io (built and maintained by the vATIS project and sourced from the FAA's SWIM system). This request requires no API key and no account.

• The request contains only the airport identifier (for example KLAX) — no name, email, account, device identifier, or personal contact information.
• Like any internet request, the ATIS service may receive your device's IP address and standard request metadata as part of normal network operation. Your use of that service is subject to its own policies.
• Coverage is limited to U.S. airports that publish D-ATIS. Where a field has no D-ATIS, the feature simply does not appear and nothing is fabricated. Results are cached briefly on your device to reduce requests.

3.5 Airport surface data (OpenStreetMap / Overpass) (internet)

The taxi map, taxi routing, and runway-crossing features use airport movement-surface geometry (runways, taxiways, holding positions, gates, and aprons) derived from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The App fetches a small, airport-sized extract for the active airport from a public Overpass API endpoint (overpass-api.de, with overpass.kumi.systems as a failover). These requests require no API key and no account.

• Each request contains only a small geographic bounding box (roughly a few kilometers) around the airport you are flying to or from — no name, email, account, device identifier, or personal contact information.
• Like any internet request, the Overpass operator may receive your device's IP address and standard request metadata as part of normal network operation. Your use of that service is subject to its own policies.
• Extracts are cached locally on your device and refreshed infrequently (about every 75 days), so the App is not on the network during taxi. OSM data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0.

3.6 Maps

• iOS The Weather tab can display a route/weather map overlay using Apple's MapKit. Rendering maps may involve communication with Apple's mapping services to retrieve map tiles and related data, subject to Apple's Privacy Policy. The developer does not receive any data through this feature.
• Android The Android app uses no third-party map SDK and no map API key. It draws both the route map and the taxi map itself on its own canvas, using bundled public-domain Natural Earth coastlines (no network) and, for the route map only, an optional keyless satellite underlay from NASA GIBS requested once per route for the map area shown. No Google Maps, Mapbox, or other tile-provider account is involved, and no map request carries anything but the geographic window being drawn.

3.7 Text-to-speech

Spoken ATC and pilot calls are generated on your device: with Apple's AVSpeechSynthesizer iOS, and with the Android TextToSpeech engine selected in your device settings Android. The App sends nothing to the developer through this feature. The Android text-to-speech engine is a system component supplied by your device or by an engine you have installed; if that engine performs any network synthesis, it does so under its own provider's policy and outside the App's control. Voices can be chosen, and speech disabled, in the App's settings.

3.8 SimBrief flight planning (opened in your own browser)

The App can open SimBrief (a Navigraph service) so you can build a flight plan and load it into Infinite Flight. SimBrief is opened in your own browser session — an in-app Safari view (SFSafariViewController) iOS or an Android Custom Tab Android — not in an embedded web view controlled by the App.

• The App does not read, scrape, or record what you do on SimBrief, injects no script into the page, and does not alter what the site shows.
• Your use of SimBrief is governed by Navigraph's own terms and privacy policy, and any account you use there is between you and Navigraph.
• The App cannot see your browsing activity, and no browsing data is collected or transmitted by the App.

3.9 En-route sector boundaries (bundled, no network)

Center hand-offs use ARTCC / FIR / UIR boundaries adapted from the VATSIM VATSpy Data Project (CC BY-SA 4.0). This dataset is bundled inside the App and involves no network request and no data of yours. Sector frequencies used in the simulated conversation are themselves simulated.

3.10 Purchases, subscriptions, and entitlements

Mock Mode is free. Live Connected Mode is unlocked by an optional monthly subscription, annual subscription, or one-time lifetime purchase. Purchases are handled entirely by the platform store:

• iOS Apple in-app purchase (StoreKit). Entitlement is read from Apple's own transaction records on your device. Manage or cancel a subscription in the App Store account settings.
• Android Google Play Billing. Entitlement is read from Google Play's own purchase records for the Google account signed in on the device. Manage or cancel a subscription at Google Play → Subscriptions. Purchases are also subject to the Google Play Terms of Service.

• The developer never sees, receives, or stores your payment method, billing address, or any financial information. That information is handled by Apple or Google, not by the App, and no purchase request carries anything about you to us.
• The App has no account and no server, so an entitlement is simply the store's answer to "is this device's store account entitled right now?"
• Android The last entitlement Google Play confirmed is cached in app-private storage so a launch without connectivity does not drop a paying customer into Mock Mode mid-flight. That cache never leaves the device, is replaced by the next successful Play query, and is deliberately excluded from Android cloud backup and device transfer so an entitlement can never travel between accounts.
• Refunds, cancellations, and subscription questions are handled through the store you purchased from.

3.11 Notifications, background audio, and keeping the screen awake

• Android While a flight is active, the App can run a foreground service (FOREGROUND_SERVICE, FOREGROUND_SERVICE_MEDIA_PLAYBACK) so ATC audio keeps playing and the session stays connected when the App is not in front. Android requires a visible notification for this, which is why the App requests notification permission (POST_NOTIFICATIONS). The notification shows your current simulated flight status only. It uses WAKE_LOCK and MODIFY_AUDIO_SETTINGS to keep the session alive and to route audio correctly. Nothing in this path is transmitted anywhere; you can decline or revoke notification permission in Android Settings, and no notification content is sent off the device.
• iOS The App can show a Live Activity / Dynamic Island summary of the current simulated flight and can keep the screen awake. This content is rendered on your device by iOS and is not sent to us.

3.12 Settings and on-device storage

Your preferences and in-progress session data are stored locally on your device — in iOS UserDefaults and app-private files iOS, and in Jetpack DataStore and app-private files and caches Android — and are not transmitted to us. This includes, for example:

• Connection settings (the host/IP address and port you enter for Infinite Flight, auto-discovery, and the weather service URL).
• Preferences such as selected voices, phraseology and unit settings, and keep-screen-awake.
• Saved flights, and a session snapshot and ATC conversation transcript used to resume an in-progress flight after a reconnect.
• User-created phraseology profiles (custom call templates and airline call names), which you can optionally export as JSON to share — sharing happens only if and when you choose to export and send a file.
• Locally cached responses from the public services above — recent aviation weather, radar/satellite imagery, ATIS reports, and OpenStreetMap airport-surface extracts — kept only to show recent data and reduce repeat requests. These caches are bounded and can be cleared in the App (Settings → Data Sources).
• A troubleshooting Diagnostics log of the App's own activity, capped in size and kept on the device. It is never uploaded; it leaves the device only if you tap share and choose where to send it.
• Android The cached Google Play entitlement described in Section 3.10.

This data remains on your device, can be cleared from within the App (for example by resetting app data or clearing a flight), and is removed when you uninstall the App.

3.13 Backup and device transfer Android

If you have Android backup enabled for your device, the operating system may copy a limited, explicitly allow-listed set of the App's files to your own Google account or to a new device during device transfer: settings and preferences, saved flights, and custom phraseology profiles. Everything else is excluded — including the cached Play entitlement, the weather and airport-surface caches, and the diagnostics log. This backup is between you, your device, and Google under the Google Privacy Policy; the developer has no access to it. You can disable backup for the App in Android Settings.

4. Permissions the App requests, and why

Neither app requests location, contacts, calendar, photos, files, health, SMS, call logs, or camera access, and neither reads an advertising identifier, the Android ID, IMEI, or build serial.

5. When data leaves your device — summary table

6. Third-party services and integrations

The App relies on the following external or platform services. We do not share your personal information with them, and we receive no data back from them.

• Infinite Flight Connect API v2 (Infinite Flight Corporation) — local-network connection to the flight simulator. See Infinite Flight's privacy policy.
• NOAA Aviation Weather Center (U.S. National Weather Service / aviationweather.gov) — public aviation weather data.
• NOAA / U.S. National Weather Service radar (mapservices.weather.noaa.gov) — public radar precipitation imagery for NOAA-covered regions.
• EUMETNET OPERA (currently disabled in shipping builds on both platforms) — European radar precipitation composites, produced by the CIRRUS production and read anonymously from the public EUMETNET Open Radar Data (ORD) cache (s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com). Radar precipitation data: EUMETNET OPERA / CIRRUS composite (CC BY 4.0).
• NASA Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) — global satellite precipitation estimate imagery, and (Android) a static route-map satellite underlay. Part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System.
• D-ATIS service (datis.clowd.io, the vATIS project) — free, public, keyless real-world FAA Digital ATIS (D-ATIS) text for U.S. airports, sourced from the FAA SWIM system.
• OpenStreetMap / Overpass API (overpass-api.de, overpass.kumi.systems) — free, public, keyless airport-surface geometry used for the taxi map, taxi routing, and runway crossings. OpenStreetMap data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. See OpenStreetMap's copyright and license page.
• VATSIM VATSpy Data Project — en-route sector boundaries, adapted and bundled with the App under CC BY-SA 4.0. No network request; VATSIM does not endorse the App.
• Natural Earth — public-domain coastline data bundled with the Android app. No network request.
• SimBrief (Navigraph) — opened in your own browser for flight planning; never scraped or read by the App. See Navigraph's privacy policy.
• Apple — App Store in-app purchase (StoreKit), Speech (speech recognition), MapKit (maps), and AVSpeechSynthesizer (text-to-speech). See Apple's Privacy Policy.
• Google — Google Play Billing (purchases and entitlement), the Android platform's speech recognition and text-to-speech components where your device uses Google's, and Android backup if you enable it. See the Google Privacy Policy.

The App contains no third-party advertising, analytics, attribution, crash-reporting, or social-media SDKs, and no third-party software development kits that collect data. On Android, the only Google libraries used are the Play Billing Library and standard Android/Jetpack components.

7. How we use information

Because the App does not transmit your data to us, we do not use your personal information for any purpose. On-device, the data described above is used solely to:

• generate simulated, procedural ATC and pilot phraseology for your flight;
• display your flight state, flight plan, and route weather;
• render the airport taxi map, taxi routing, and runway-crossing guidance from OpenStreetMap data, and play real-world ATIS for your departure and arrival airports;
• recognize your spoken push-to-talk input to drive the conversation;
• determine whether your store account has unlocked Live Connected Mode; and
• remember your preferences, saved flights, and resume an in-progress session.

We do not sell, rent, or share personal information, we do not transfer any data to third parties for advertising or analytics, and we do not use your data for advertising or for tracking you across apps or websites.

8. Data retention and deletion

We hold no data about you, because we never receive any. There is no account to delete and no server-side record to erase. All preferences, saved flights, profiles, session snapshots, transcripts, and caches are stored only on your device, and you control them:

• clear in-app data using the App's reset / clear-flight controls, and clear cached weather and airport data in Settings → Data Sources;
• revoke microphone, speech-recognition, notification, or local-network permissions in iOS Settings or Android Settings → Apps → IFATC Companion → Permissions;
• Android clear everything at once with Android Settings → Apps → IFATC Companion → Storage & cache → Clear storage, and disable Android backup for the App if you do not want settings and saved flights copied to your Google account;
• delete all locally stored data by uninstalling the App from your device.

If you would like confirmation about data handling, or believe any data of yours has reached us, write to [email protected] and we will respond, and delete anything we hold, within 30 days.

9. Children's privacy

The App is a flight-simulation companion intended for a general audience and is not directed to children. It is not designed for, targeted at, or primarily child-directed, and it is not enrolled in Google Play's Teacher Approved or Families programs. The App does not knowingly collect personal information from children (including from anyone under 13, or the equivalent age in your jurisdiction), and it contains no accounts, no advertising, no third-party SDKs, no social or user-generated-content features, and no external links other than the documented data sources and store pages described above. Optional purchases are made through the platform store, subject to that store's own parental controls. If you believe a child has provided personal information through any feature, please contact us so we can address it.

10. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights under privacy laws such as the EU/UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA), including rights to access, correct, delete, or port personal data, and to opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of personal data. Because IFATC Companion does not collect or transmit personal information to us and does not sell or share personal information, there is no developer-held personal data to access, correct, delete, or opt out of. You can exercise full control over the App's on-device data using the deletion steps in Section 8. If you have questions about your rights, contact us using the details below.

11. Security

The App minimizes privacy risk by design: it keeps data on your device, uses local-network connections for Infinite Flight, and relies on the platform's protections for app-private storage (iOS data protection; Android app-private storage and, on Android, an allow-listed backup configuration). Every internet request the App makes uses HTTPS/TLS; on Android, cleartext traffic is blocked by the app's network security configuration. The App embeds no API keys, tokens, or credentials, because none of the services it uses require them. Connections to Infinite Flight occur on your own local network; you control that network's security. No method of electronic storage or transmission is 100% secure, but because we do not collect or store your data on any server, there is no central repository of your information to be exposed.

12. International users

The App can be used worldwide. The public services it contacts are operated by their respective providers — for example NOAA and NASA (U.S. government services), the vATIS project's D-ATIS service, OpenStreetMap Overpass operators, Apple, and Google. Using these services may involve processing in the United States or other countries under those providers' own policies. The developer does not transfer your personal data internationally because the developer does not receive it.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time, for example to reflect new features, a new platform, or legal requirements. When we do, we will revise the "Last updated" date above and post the updated policy at this URL, which is the URL listed on both store listings. Material changes will be reflected here; your continued use of the App after an update constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

14. Contact us

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or your privacy, contact:

• Developer: H3 Consulting Partners LLC
• App: IFATC Companion (iOS / iPadOS and Android — com.h3consultingpartners.ifatccompanion)
• Privacy contact email: [email protected]