Terms of Use

Legal

The terms that govern your access to and use of the ETHOS website, its public pages, and the signed-in dashboard.

Effective Date: September 14, 2026

These Terms of Use (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the ETHOS Database website: the public pages, the signed-in dashboard, and every request you make to the site, whether you use a browser or software of your own (together, the “Site”). You accept them by using the Site, along with our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the Site.

ETHOS stands for Emergency Transport Healthcare Operations and Safety. The ETHOS Database catalogues air medical bases and aircraft across the United States, for advocacy, operations, and research. Where these Terms say “ETHOS,” they mean that database and the Site that serves it.

ETHOS Database is independently owned and operated, with the University of Pittsburgh PRODCTS Lab as a research partner. It is not a project of, and is not owned or operated by, the University of Pittsburgh. ETHOS Database is an independent initiative that is not yet incorporated and intends to register as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit; until that registration completes there is no separate legal entity behind it, and no registered address to give.

If you are accepting these Terms on behalf of an organization, for example when your organization registers to contribute data, you confirm you are authorized to do so.

Who May Use the Site

The public pages are open to anyone to read. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account or to submit anything to ETHOS.

Accounts and Access

Most of the Site needs no account. An account is not usable until it has been confirmed: one you register yourself when you click the link in the email we send you, and one you were invited to when you set a password from the invitation. What you can see and change after you sign in depends on the permissions ETHOS assigns to your account, and those permissions are not the same for every account. ETHOS decides what each account is given, and may change or withdraw it at any time.

You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for what happens under your account. Repeated failed sign-ins lock an account temporarily, and changing a password signs out every session, the one you changed it from included; you sign in again with the new password. Tell us at support@ethosdatabase.org if you think someone else has used your account. We may suspend or close accounts that break these Terms.

Acceptable Use

Use the Site lawfully and considerately. You may not:

  • Use the Site for any unlawful purpose, or in breach of any applicable law or regulation
  • Try to reach accounts, records, or systems you have not been given access to
  • Probe, scan, or test the Site’s security without our prior written permission, or interfere with its normal operation. To ask for that permission, write to support@ethosdatabase.org with “Security testing” in the subject line
  • Upload or transmit malicious software, harmful code, or content meant to disrupt the Site or its users
  • Exceed the request limits ETHOS sets, work around them, or otherwise place an unreasonable load on the Site
  • Take ETHOS data off the Site, by hand or with software, without our prior written permission, as described below
  • Use contact details found in the database to send unsolicited marketing
  • Misrepresent the source, currency, or accuracy of anything you take from the Site, or present it as endorsed by ETHOS

ETHOS Data

The public pages and the map let you look up and read base information on the Site. That is what they are there for.

Reuse needs our permission first. Without prior written permission from ETHOS, you may not copy, extract, download, scrape, cache for reuse, redistribute, republish, sell, or build a product, dataset or service on ETHOS data, whether you do it by hand or with software. Reading a page is not reuse. Taking the data off the Site is.

How to ask. Researchers who want a dataset use the data request process described on our Research page, and Contributing Organizations and Research Access below says what happens to an approved request. For anything else, write to hello@ethosdatabase.org and tell us what you want and what you would do with it. That is a request, not a complaint, and we would rather you asked.

What you may not do with data you have taken.

  • Present the data, or anything derived from it, as official, verified, complete, or endorsed by ETHOS
  • Remove or obscure the credit described below, where we have asked for it
  • Go beyond what a permission we granted you covers, or keep using data after that permission ends

Request limits. ETHOS limits how many requests one visitor may make, and may slow, block, or refuse traffic that goes past those limits or that looks automated. Over a limit you get an HTTP 429 response carrying a Retry-After header. Treat that as a signal to stop.

No stability promise. What the Site shows, and how it shows it, is not a fixed interface. We may change it or withdraw any part of it.

Everything behind sign-in, including contact details, aircraft records and organization information, is restricted further still: an account reaches only what ETHOS has given it, and these Terms grant no one access to any of it.

Attribution, Citation, and Map Imagery

If ETHOS grants you permission to reuse data, for example in an article, a report, a dashboard or a dataset of your own, credit it like this:

ETHOS Database, air medical base data, accessed [date].

  • Always include the date you retrieved the data. The database changes as organizations update their records.
  • Do not describe retrieved data as current or verified after that date. We cannot warrant either once the data has left the Site.
  • You may correct, filter, combine, or otherwise transform the data, but say that you have. Do not present your version as ETHOS’s.
  • State that your work is not affiliated with or endorsed by the ETHOS Database unless we have said in writing that it is.

The map imagery is not ours, and not all of it is under one license. Which provider serves a map depends on the style you picked, so any reuse of a map view, a screenshot included, carries that provider’s own terms on top of the permission ETHOS asks for above. Where a provider’s terms allow a copy, the credits shown on the map have to travel with it.

  • Street, Light, Dark and Terrain come from Stadia Maps, built on OpenMapTiles and OpenStreetMap data and credited “© Stadia Maps © OpenMapTiles © OpenStreetMap”. Terrain adds “© Stamen Design”. The underlying OpenStreetMap data is published under the Open Database License (ODbL).
  • Satellite is not OpenStreetMap data and is not under the ODbL. It comes from Esri (ArcGIS Online World Imagery) and is credited “Tiles © Esri”. Reusing it is governed by Esri’s terms for that service, not by these Terms and not by the ODbL. Check them before you republish a satellite view.
  • When a provider will not serve a tile, whichever style you had selected and Satellite included, the map falls back to OpenStreetMap, and what you then see is OpenStreetMap tiles credited “© OpenStreetMap contributors” under the ODbL. The credit on the map changes with the tiles; go by what the map shows you at the moment you copy it.

What You Submit

Signed-in users type content into ETHOS: base and aircraft records, organization details, and the free-text fields on registration and data requests. When you submit something, you:

  • Confirm you have the right to submit it, and that it is accurate as far as you know
  • Grant ETHOS a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, process, display, and publish it as part of the database, including on the public pages of the Site, for the fields those pages show
  • Agree not to submit patient information, protected health information, or personal data beyond the operational contact details a record asks for

ETHOS is not built or configured to receive patient data, and we ask you not to put any into it.

Contributing Organizations and Research Access

Air medical organizations contribute operational data through the accounts ETHOS approves for them, and these Terms govern that use of the Site. Where ETHOS Database and a contributing organization have signed a separate written agreement covering the contributed data, that agreement controls wherever the two conflict.

Researchers who want de-identified datasets request them through the process described on our Research page. The terms an approved requester agrees to before any data is released are not final yet. We will publish them when they are. These Terms grant no access to anything beyond the base information the public pages show, described under ETHOS Data above.

Intellectual Property

The Site itself, including its software, text, graphics, logos, and the ETHOS name, belongs to ETHOS or its licensors. Except where the Site expressly offers otherwise, please do not copy, modify, distribute, or build derivative works from the Site or its content without our written permission. ETHOS Data above says how to ask for permission covering the data itself.

The ETHOS name and logo may not be used in any way that suggests sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement without our prior written authorization.

No Warranty

ETHOS is a reference database assembled from what organizations choose to contribute. It is necessarily incomplete: not every operator participates, records go out of date between updates, and we do not independently verify what is submitted.

ETHOS is not a dispatch system, an availability feed, or a capability verification service. Do not use it to decide where to send a patient, which aircraft to request, or whether a base can accept a flight. Confirm with the operator directly.

The Site and all content are provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Site will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that any content is accurate, complete, or current. Your use of the Site is at your own risk.

Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, ETHOS and its partners, contributors, employees, and agents are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, data, or use, arising out of or in connection with your access to or use of the Site, even if we were told such damages were possible. This section survives the end of your use of the Site.

Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless ETHOS and its partners, contributors, employees, and agents against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or related to your use of the Site or your breach of these Terms.

We will tell you promptly about any claim we ask you to cover, and you may take over its defense with counsel we reasonably approve. We will not settle such a claim without your agreement.

Suspension and Termination

We may suspend or end your access if you break these Terms, if your organization’s participation ends, or if we stop operating the Site. Deactivation takes effect the next time that account loads a page or makes a request to the Site: any session it still holds stops working from that moment. You can stop using the Site at any time, and you can ask us to deactivate your account at the address below.

Records stay. When an account or an organization is removed, ETHOS marks the record deleted and stops showing it; it does not erase it. The base and aircraft records an organization contributed remain part of the database, as does the audit trail of who created and changed them. There is no self-service deletion, and nothing in the product permanently erases a record. Our Privacy Policy sets out what that means for personal information.

Changes to These Terms

We may change these Terms by posting an updated version on this page and updating the Effective Date above. Continuing to use the Site after a change means you accept the updated Terms.

Governing Law and Venue

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or your use of the Site will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

General

  • Severability. If any part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
  • No waiver. Not enforcing a provision once does not waive it, or our right to enforce it later.
  • Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours to a successor operator of ETHOS, including to the nonprofit entity described above, once it exists.
  • Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and ETHOS about the Site, except where a signed agreement covering contributed data or a research dataset says otherwise.

Contact

Questions about these Terms? Reach us at:

Email is the only contact channel ETHOS Database operates. There is no postal address to write to and no phone number to call.

Security reports. Write to support@ethosdatabase.org with “Security” in the subject line. ETHOS has no dedicated security inbox and no bug bounty, and makes no response-time commitment. We read every report.