Editorial policy

Where the data comes from

Almost everything on Sprinkle is published data that we collect, reconcile and link together. Aircraft come from civil registries — the US FAA, Transport Canada, CASA in Australia, ANAC in Brazil and the New Zealand CAA. Aerodromes, runways, frequencies and navaids come from OurAirports; airspace and obstacles from OpenAIP; operators from OpenFlights; type designators from ICAO Doc 8643; place names from GeoNames; and cross-source identities from Wikidata. Documents come from regulator libraries, principally the FAA and EASA.

Every row we store carries the source it came from and the licence we hold for it, and public pages only show data we have the right to republish. The full list, with each source’s authority and licence, is on the data sources page.

Aircraft for sale work differently. A listing is either uploaded to Sprinkle by the seller or their dealer, or collected from the dealer or broker site that published it. Listings we collect are held out of the public site until they are checked, rather than published automatically.

Which parts are written by AI

Some text on Sprinkle is written by a language model rather than by a person. We would rather say so plainly than let you guess:

• Document overviews and key takeaways on manual pages are written by a language model reading the document itself. They are a summary of that document, not our own guidance, and they can be wrong or incomplete.
• Key points and frequently-asked questions on regulation pages are produced the same way, from the text of the regulation.
• Photo checks.Photos submitted to an aircraft record are read by OpenAI’s gpt-4o to judge whether the image shows an aircraft, how usable it is, and whether a visible tail number matches the page.
• The Sprinkle assistant, where it is switched on, answers using an OpenAI GPT model (gpt-5.4-mini at the time of writing). It is built to answer only from pages and documents on Sprinkle, and to say that a person will follow up rather than guess when it cannot find the answer.

Wherever you see a summary of a document, the original document is linked from the same page. The original is the authority; the summary is a convenience. For anything that matters, read the source.

Specifications, registration and ownership histories, airport and airspace data and marketplace listing details are not written by AI. They are the source data, reconciled and reformatted.

What people check

We want to be honest about the scale here. Sprinkle holds on the order of a million records, and nobody reads every one of them. What people do check:

• Submitted photos.The model’s job is only to sort. Anything it is unsure about — not an aircraft, poor quality, or a tail number that does not match the page — goes to a queue for a person. A photo is never rejected by software; that is always a human decision, and a photo check that fails for any reason goes to the queue rather than straight onto the site.
• Listings we collect from other sites. These sit in a pending state, hidden from the public site, rather than being published on arrival.
• Reported problems. Anything you tell us about is looked at by a person.

Beyond that, the checking is automated: cross-source reconciliation, licence and republication rules applied per source, and a set of monitors that watch for broken or wrong pages. Where a page has nothing trustworthy to show, we would rather it showed nothing.

How often it refreshes, and corrections

Each source refreshes on its own schedule rather than a single site-wide one — the FAA registry weekly, for example. The per-source notes on the data sources page say what we hold and from where. Registry data is also only as current as the registry: a recent sale or re-registration can take weeks to appear in the published file, and will not show on Sprinkle until it does.

If something is wrong, tell us and we will correct the record, or remove it where we should not be showing it at all. Please include the page address. Corrections to source data also need fixing at the registry or publisher, because our copy refreshes from theirs — we will say so if that is the case.

Sprinkle is a reference surface and not approved aeronautical information. It is not for flight planning, navigation, dispatch or any other operational decision — see section 5 of our terms.