Aircraft Registration and Enforcement Policy

This policy covers the aircraft record rather than the aircraft. It sets out how a unit gets into your hangar, what the record says about where it came from, how it moves to another owner, and what happens when we act against one.

It is part of the Terms of Service. Firmware itself is licensed under the Firmware License Agreement, and the conduct rules that sit behind an enforcement decision are in the Acceptable Use Policy.

Account, Fleet holds the aircraft on your account, up to 24 of them. Each one carries the model, the hardware revision, the firmware target, your own status for it, and the flight and maintenance records you write against it.

• The records are yours to write and yours to keep accurate. Nothing validates a flight log against reality. A hangar entry is your account of your aircraft, and we treat it as such.
• Status is yours. Marking an aircraft ready, in maintenance, grounded or retired is your call about your machine. We do not set it and we do not override it.
• Registering an aircraft here is not registering it with a regulator. The two are unrelated. Section 6 covers the obligations that are actually yours.
• Deleting an entry deletes your record of it. It does not undo a claim against a serial, and it does not clear an enforcement case.

Every hangar entry carries a provenance, and it is the difference between something we can vouch for and something you told us.

Every unit we build gets a serial in our register before it leaves. A link code is printed on the frame beside it. Entering both together is what proves the aircraft is in your hands, and it is the only way to claim one.

• Only a shipped unit can be claimed. A serial that is still in build, on the bench, or written off is not claimable, whatever code is quoted with it.
• A failed attempt does not tell you which half was wrong. That is deliberate, and it is why claims are also rate limited.
• A revoked link code stops working. We revoke one where a frame is reported stolen or where the code has been published. Contact support if you have bought a unit whose code no longer works.
• Guessing is a breach. Working through serials or codes to find a live pair is prohibited under the Acceptable Use Policy, and it is treated as an attempt to reach another person’s property.

A SpaltX airframe can change hands privately. Claiming a serial that another account holds moves it: the entry leaves their hangar and arrives in yours, marked pre-owned. There is no approval step, and there is no form for the seller to sign.

What this means if you are selling. Hand over the frame and the buyer can claim it, because the code they need is printed on it. Wipe anything you care about from the aircraft first. Your flight and maintenance records stay with you and do not travel to the buyer.

What this means if you are buying. Claiming the serial tells you the unit is genuine and that our register knows it shipped. It does not tell you the seller owned it, and it does not tell you what it has been through. Ask for the order it came from, and treat a seller who will not let you claim the serial before payment as a warning.

An aircraft under an open case cannot be transferred. A unit with a live enforcement case is frozen where it is until the case closes. Leaving the case behind on the seller would erase it, and moving it forward would land it on a buyer who has done nothing wrong. Neither is acceptable, so the transfer waits.

Transfers do not move a warranty, an entitlement or a subscription. What a buyer gets from us on a second-hand unit is set out in the Returns and Refund Policy.

Nothing in our register discharges an obligation you owe a regulator. These are yours, and they are yours whether or not the aircraft is in a hangar here.

• Registration and marking. In the United States an unmanned aircraft over 250 grams must be registered with the FAA and marked with its registration number. Your hangar entry can hold that number and its expiry, and we warn you 60 days out. The warning is a convenience. Missing it is still your lapse.
• Remote identification. Where the rules where you fly require an aircraft to broadcast its identity, meeting that requirement is yours, including on an aircraft you built or modified.
• Pilot credentials and airspace. Hold whatever certificate your flight requires, get the authorization the airspace requires, and keep to the operating limits that apply to it.
• Insurance. We provide none, and none of our products carries any.
• Rules outside the United States. The obligations above are the US shape of a duty that exists nearly everywhere in a different form. Find the local one before you fly.

The compliance summary walks through this in more detail. It explains the rules; it is not a legal opinion and it does not replace reading them.

Registering an aircraft here is how we can reach you when a release it is running turns out to be defective. A withdrawn release is marked rather than deleted, and an aircraft recorded on one is told to stop flying it.

• The hangar reports whether the build on your aircraft is current, has an update, or has been recalled. That reading is only as good as what you recorded on the entry.
• We notify by email to the account. Keep the address current, and do not filter mail from us into a folder you never open.
• Do not flash a withdrawn release from a copy you kept. The changelog names the replacement.
• An aircraft you never registered here gets no notice, and an aircraft registered under the wrong target gets the wrong one.

We open enforcement against an aircraft where we have reason to believe it has been used in a way that breaks the Acceptable Use Policy, the law where it was flown, or the safety limits the product carries. In practice that is:

• An incident report, from you, from a member of the public, or from an authority.
• A pattern in what has been logged or downloaded against the aircraft that points at deliberate misuse.
• Evidence that entitlement gating or firmware integrity has been worked around.
• A claim that the airframe was stolen, or that a serial was claimed by someone who never held the frame.
• An order or a request from a regulator or a court.

Every action we take carries a written reason.

The two lighter steps sit on the aircraft, not on your account, and both are visible to you on the aircraft page as soon as they are issued.

• A warning records that something happened and that we told you. It carries no expiry, counts toward nothing, and restricts nothing.
• A strike counts. Strikes lapse on their own, normally after 180 days, and stop counting the moment they do. A strike can be issued to stay on the record permanently where the conduct warrants it, and we say so when we issue it.
• 3 live strikes open a case. Reaching the threshold is not a revocation. It opens a review, and Section 10 is what happens in one.
• Strikes already weighed are not weighed twice. When a case closes, the strikes that led to it stop counting toward the next one. An aircraft whose case was dismissed does not sit one strike away from another case forever.
• A strike can be voided. Where we got it wrong we void it, with a written reason, and the count drops immediately.

A case is opened either by reaching the strike threshold or by a staff member proposing one directly for something serious enough not to wait. Each case has a code beginning ENF-, which is what you quote when you write to us about it.

One person cannot do this alone. The staff member who proposes a case cannot be the one who decides it, and an appeal must be decided by a third person who was neither. That separation is a database constraint, so it holds regardless of who is logged in and regardless of what any console lets somebody click.

Appealing does not pause the revocation. It asks for the aircraft back, and the restriction stays while that is being read.

A revocation restricts four writes on the aircraft record, and nothing else. It is not a grounding and we cannot make it one.

A revocation does not by itself restrict your account, your orders or your other aircraft. Where the conduct also breaks the Acceptable Use Policy, an account-level step can follow under that policy, separately and with its own notice.

Appeal from the aircraft page, or write to support@spaltx.com with the case code in the subject line. Tell us what we got wrong or what has changed. A third staff member reads it, and we answer within ten business days.

• Send what you have: a flight log, a photograph, an authorization, a police report, a bill of sale. An appeal that only disagrees gives the reader nothing to move on.
• Where the case followed a purchase dispute or a stolen-frame report, the fastest route is usually the paperwork from that, not an argument about it.
• An overturned case releases the aircraft immediately and the strikes behind it are voided.
• A decision upheld on appeal is final within our process. The dispute resolution section of the Terms of Service is what remains open to you after that.

Cases, actions and their reasons are kept for as long as the account exists and then on the schedule in the Privacy Policy. A build stage recorded against a serial is never rewritten.

• You see every warning, strike and case against an aircraft you hold, with the reason written on it.
• You do not see the internal notes staff write to each other about a case, or the identity of a person who reported an incident.
• An aircraft you transfer away takes its case history with it, because the history belongs to the airframe. Your own flight and maintenance records stay with you.
• Ask for a copy of everything held against you through Account, Privacy.