Recording and retention

Being recorded is a condition of enrolling in this program. You cannot decline to be recorded and still take the program.

That is stated first, and plainly, because it is a real condition and you are entitled to decide against it before you pay rather than discover it afterwards. If recording is not something you want, this is the right moment to say so, and saying so costs you nothing.

This is Decision 26 and it is not negotiable per candidate. It is not a formality either. Two of the three things that make this program different from a generic CFI course depend on it: you critique your own teaching from a transcript of what you actually said, and your ACS Coverage is computed from those transcripts. A candidate who opted out would be in a materially different and worse program.

Every participant in a ground lesson joins the Meet from their own device with a headset, even when you are sitting in the same room. This is not ceremony. A single shared microphone attributes every word to whoever's account started the meeting, which produces a transcript that is confidently wrong rather than obviously broken. See the caveat below.

The vocabulary here is exact, and the distinctions are load bearing. Definitions are in CONTEXT.md.

• Session Recording. The audio and video capture itself.
• Session Transcript. The verbatim, timestamped, speaker-labeled text of it. This is the only permitted input to Coverage, because it is the only artifact that records what was actually said.
• Session Notes. Gemini's generated summary. A convenience for you and your instructor. Never an input to Coverage, because it is an interpretation and has already been observed to misattribute who was teaching. See docs/adr/0001.
• Coverage. Which ACS areas and tasks the lesson demonstrably addressed. A statement about topics raised, never about how well they were taught, and never a grant of credit.
• Review Video. Raw footage of a Student's flight, retained only long enough to be considered for promotion into a Clip.
• Clip. A segment Erick has editorially chosen to teach from, published to Vimeo.

The principle behind that table, in one sentence: the assessment is the record and the footage is not. Once the transcript, the Coverage, and the written assessment exist, the raw video has done its work. Keeping it anyway would build an indefinitely growing archive of identifiable people recorded in cockpits, including on flights where something went wrong, for no purpose that is not already served.

The practical consequence for you, and it matters. Your development is evidenced by written assessments, not by a video archive you can re-watch a year later. Anything that has to survive, including anything feeding your mock practical test or your recommendation for the checkride, is written down at review time. If a judgment about your teaching exists only in a video, it will not exist in 31 days.

A retention policy that is only a sentence becomes "kept forever because nobody ran the delete." That is the outcome ADR 0002 exists to prevent, and saying so here is not enough on its own.

The deletion mechanism lives in the school-wide media capability, not in this curriculum. That is the project that owns capture, transcription, storage, and retention enforcement for every North Aero program, of which CFI is the first consumer and not the owner (Decisions 19, 38). This statement specifies the posture; that capability runs it.

Open item, recorded rather than glossed. The scheduled deletion job is part of the school-wide media capability's scope. Confirming that it exists, runs, and is monitored is that project's to close, and it is named on the board as an interface. Until it is confirmed running, the honest description of the retention posture is that it is policy rather than demonstrated practice, and this document should not claim otherwise.

Parameter P9. This access list is the school's position and applies to Session Recordings, Session Transcripts, and cockpit footage of you.

Marketing is not on that list by default. Decision 16 makes this program's video work a marketing differentiator shown to prospective candidates, and that refers to Clips of Students who have signed consent, and to the shape of the program, not to footage of you. If North Aero wants to show your teaching to a prospective candidate, someone asks you, specifically, in writing, and you are free to say no. Saying no has no effect on your training.

Access is not the same as retention. An artifact deleted on the 30 day window is not available to anyone on this list afterwards, including you.

Stated plainly rather than left for each instructor to improvise a position on, because the moment it matters is the worst possible moment to be inventing one.

1. A recording may be discoverable. If there is an accident, an incident, or an enforcement action, a recording that exists may be obtainable by the FAA, the NTSB, or a party to litigation. North Aero does not promise otherwise and no instructor should imply otherwise.
2. Nobody deletes anything to make it unavailable. If North Aero becomes aware of an accident, incident, or investigation, the routine 30 day deletion is suspended for the material that may be relevant, and it is preserved. Running a scheduled deletion is retention policy; deleting because something went wrong is not, and North Aero will not do it.
3. The recording is not a substitute for the report. Anything you are required to report, you report.
4. The default deletion is what reduces exposure, and it does it the legitimate way: by not accumulating an archive in the first place, on a schedule set in advance and applied uniformly. That is ADR 0002's reasoning and it only works if the schedule is genuinely uniform.

Your side, which is what this statement owns. Your agreement to be recorded is a condition of enrollment, disclosed here in writing before you pay, and recorded as part of your enrollment. It covers recording of your Taught Ground Lessons and your cockpit teaching, for the training and assessment purposes described on this page. It does not cover marketing use of your footage, which is asked for separately.

The Students' side, which this statement does not reopen. Signed student consent covering recording and sharing is already in place and has been through legal review (Decision 22). The Clips you will critique in this program exist under that consent. This document does not modify, extend, or reinterpret it.

Speaker attribution by identity, which is what separates your teaching from your instructor's in-character questions in a transcript, has not yet been proven to work in the configuration this program relies on. It is assumed to work when each participant joins from their own device with a headset, and the single-microphone case is already known to fail silently.

Ticket 03 tests it. Until that test is run and recorded, Coverage should be treated as unproven tooling rather than a working feature. Nothing about your training depends on it working. Every part of this program is written so that the teaching skill survives the tooling being late: the lessons, the critiques, and your instructor's judgment all work without it. What would be lost is the automatic ACS Coverage view, not the training.

• ✓States plainly, not buried, that recording is a condition of enrollment and cannot be declined
• ✓Retention posture stated for Review Videos, cockpit footage, Session Transcripts, Coverage, written assessments, and Clips (Decisions 36, 37, ADR 0002)
• ✓States that deletion actually runs and names where the mechanism lives, with the open confirmation recorded rather than assumed
• ✓Access list names who may view a recording and under what circumstances (P9)
• ✓States the school's position on recordings of flights where something went wrong, including discoverability in an accident investigation or enforcement action
• ✓States the consent basis (cross-cutting requirement 9), owning the candidate's side and not reopening the signed student consent (Decision 22)
• ✓Uses the CONTEXT.md terms exactly