Free Flight Planning Site

It looks like another free flight planning site is online, and it looks pretty good for the price.

http://flightcentral.net/

Very Impressive, but..

This site has some really nice features that I have not seen before. Take the video tour; it's very well done. It must have cost quite a bit to create the site and will be at least a little costly to maintain. There are no advertisements, at least not yet. So how do they pay for it?

Second, related to the first point, there is zero information on who they are and there is no privacy policy. If you give them your identifying information they are free to do with it whatever they wish. The site appears to be owned by www.goldsealflight.com in Atlanta, but even that is not for sure. Yes, I suspect they are paying for it by selling contact information from registrations. Once sold, the information can go anywhere to anyone.

That said, they are not getting much more info that is publicly available on pilots anyhow. We can know that from the number of free publications we get. Of course, they are getting an email address... I have the ability on my email to designate any number of mailboxes, so I could use it and then cut that address off it it were abused. Can you?

The frequencies list it generated when I entered a sample flight of about 200nm was pretty nice.

b,d

I was one of the beta testers (strictly volunteer) for this site and personally know the folks implementing it. I don't know for sure (didn't ask) but I am reasonably certain that they have no intention of selling anyone's contact information. Their model is to sell ads, and not to charge subscription fees.

I know that they value input from users like the post above.

I'll contact the owners and I would be willing to bet you see a reply from them on this forum with more information.

That is very easy to use. I'll give it a try for my next X-country.

hevansrv7a said:

Yes, I suspect they are paying for it by selling contact information from registrations. Once sold, the information can go anywhere to anyone.

Click to expand...

I'm one of the developers of FlightCentral.net.

I just wanted to drop in and thank everyone for taking a look at the website and dispell some myths about our intentions.

Our intentions are to keep the site free, and yes, we will be adding some advertising at some point. That said, we WILL NOT be selling anyones information, etc. We are working on a privacy policy that will be posted on the website very soon (as in today) that will explain it in detail.

We are very concious in the fact that privacy is of a major concern. Our intention was not to hide anything about us or our goals, and there will be more information regarding FlightCentral and our mission posted on the website along with the privacy policy. Honestly, we just got so excited about adding more features that those things fell off our radar a little further than intended.

We look forward to hearing everyones comments/suggestions/complaints as we continue to build the site. We have tons of new features in the works, and hope that everyone will give it a look. You don't even have to register to check most of the website out. Registration gives you the ability to customize several aspects of the website, but is not needed to enjoy many of our features.

Looks pretty good

One suggestion is to graphically add TFR's like the (Harder to use) AOPA system does.

Frank

Thanks for the Clarification

I am happy to have been wrong about the site owners' intentions. In today's world of bad actors on the 'net it is kind of strange that anyone would think of putting out a site with no information on "who we are" nor a privacy policy. It will be good to see the site develop along commonly accepted lines of responsibility. The features are very nice!

ostrich99 said:

I'm one of the developers of FlightCentral.net.


We look forward to hearing everyones comments/suggestions/complaints as we continue to build the site. We have tons of new features in the works, and hope that everyone will give it a look.

Click to expand...

How about decoded METARs and TAFs and then add TFRs. Site looks pretty good and I plan to try it out on my next Xcountry.

I tried to access it last night

But after several minutes (dial-up connection) and nothing showing I gave up.

Flashing ads are annoying.

Ron Lee said:

Flashing ads are annoying.

Click to expand...

Annoying?????

You are too kind.

Canadian info would be nice

I know we are a minority eh?, but Canadian info would be nice as well.

Wayne said:

I know we are a minority eh?, but Canadian info would be nice as well.

Click to expand...

You are not the first to request that. We didn't intentionally leave you guys/gals out, it just wasn't in the dataset that we get from the FAA.

It's on our list to investigate. If we can get similar data from the Canadian authorities, then we will most likely be adding it to our databases.