The short version
VectorEFB is a planning and training aid. Use it to prepare and to understand what you are looking at, then check everything that matters against the official source.
Not certified for navigation. Use current charts, the AIP, NOTAMs and an official weather briefing for any real flight. VectorEFB is not an official aeronautical information service and none of its data is guaranteed to be current or complete.
What it cannot do
- Traffic is incomplete. Only aircraft that transmit ADS-B Out appear. Many light training aeroplanes, gliders and military aircraft do not, so an empty sky on the map is not an empty sky.
- Weather is as old as its timestamp. METAR, TAF and SIGMET are shown as the weather service published them, with the age beside them. Radar and satellite imagery is a picture of a few minutes ago. Forecast winds are a model, not a measurement.
- Terrain is a model. Terrain comes from public elevation models with a resolution of roughly 30 to 60 metres. Peaks can be smoothed lower than they are, and masts and wires may be missing or estimated. The terrain check is a prompt to look at the chart, not a clearance guarantee.
- Airspace may be out of date. Airspace, reporting points and obstacles come from a community database and can lag behind the official AIP. Always check the current AIP and NOTAMs.
- No NOTAMs. VectorEFB does not show NOTAMs. Get them from an official source before every flight.
- Synthetic vision is estimated. The attitude shown in synthetic view is worked out from position and track. It is not an instrument and must not be flown by.
- Flight recording is not a tracking service. Positions reach the school only when the device has a signal. This is not flight following, an alerting service or a search-and-rescue system.
Where the data comes from
Every layer in the app names its source and shows how old it is. This is the full list. Some sources are licensed for non-commercial use only, which is one reason VectorEFB is free to use for now. The same list is in the app under More, Data sources.
| What | Source | Licence and credit |
|---|---|---|
| Live traffic | adsb.lol | ODbL |
| METAR, TAF, SIGMET | aviationweather.gov (NOAA) | US government data |
| Forecast winds, cloud cover, CAPE | Weather data by Open-Meteo.com | CC BY 4.0. The free API is for non-commercial use. |
| Radar | Weather data by RainViewer | Provider terms |
| Infrared, cloud and storm imagery | EUMETSAT Meteosat | Contains modified EUMETSAT Meteosat data and products, 2026 |
| Airspace, reporting points, obstacles | openAIP | CC BY-NC 4.0. Data are processed and reformatted for display. |
| Airports, runways, frequencies, navaids | OurAirports | Public domain |
| Terrain | AWS Terrain Tiles | SRTM courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, 3DEP, EU-DEM (Copernicus data, funded by the European Union) and national models |
| Satellite base map | EOX Sentinel-2 cloudless | CC BY 4.0. 2016 and 2017 imagery. |
| Base maps | CARTO and OpenStreetMap contributors | ODbL |
| Airport arrivals and departures | AeroDataBox | Flight schedule data, shown in the app after sign-in |
| Aviation safety news (News page) | UK AAIB, Civil Aviation Authority and Department for Transport, through gov.uk | Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 |
| Aircraft photos | Planespotters | Credited on each photo |
Requests for radar images, satellite imagery, base maps, terrain and aircraft photos are made by your browser directly to those providers, so they see your IP address and the area you are looking at. The privacy notice says so.
About the screens on this site
The screenshots and videos of the flight-school area show Aeroclub Brasov, a demonstration school made up to show how VectorEFB works. The people, aircraft, flights, plans, logbooks and safety reports in them are invented, and nothing in them is a real training record. The app says so in a banner on every school screen.
The pilot screens are real: they show the live app with real traffic and weather as it was on the day each screenshot or recording was taken, so they will not match what you see later. Videos are sped up, and the photo of an iPad in a cockpit is an illustration with the app’s screen added to a stock photograph.
Your data
For a school’s students, the school is the data controller. A student sees what the instructor can see before anything is shared. There is no advertising, no analytics and no tracking cookies. The details are in the privacy notice and on the cookies and local storage page, and the rules for using the service are in the terms of use.
Found a mistake?
If a runway, frequency, airspace boundary or anything else in the app disagrees with the official source, we want to know. Tell us what it shows, where, and what the official source says, and we will correct it or take it out. Write to us.