Editorial policy

Terminair's stories are compiled by software from published sources. This page says what the software does, what people do, and what you can rely on.

What we cover

Airlines, airports, aircraft, regulators and the technology that airlines sell with: distribution, retailing, pricing and travel vendors. A story from the wider world appears only when it has a concrete effect on flights, airports or airspace. Real estate, entertainment business, hotel and retail news are filtered out unless they involve aviation.

How a story is formed

Finding articles. Several times an hour the system reads a public news index and about 140 feeds from airlines, airports, regulators and trade publications, in many languages.
Choosing. Rules decide whether an article is about aviation. They look at names, places, words in the headline and the type of source. A person wrote the rules and changes them when they get something wrong. Nobody judges each article.
Grouping. Articles about the same event are put into one story, so a story usually rests on several publishers.
Reading. For each story the system reads up to three of the articles, one per publisher where it can. It respects each publisher's robots.txt. It keeps the article text for 30 days to write the story and does not publish it.
Writing. A language model pulls out the facts from each article. A second model writes a headline and two or three short paragraphs in English from those facts, and, when the facts support it, one or two sentences on why the story matters.
Checking. Code checks the result before it is published. Every paragraph must cite at least one of the publishers, a source number that does not exist is rejected, and repeated sentences, headings and bullet lists are rejected. A story that fails the checks is not published.

What is automated, and what people review

Today no person reads a story before it is published. The finding, grouping, writing and checking above run without human review. We say this plainly because the byline, Terminair Editorial, stands for that system and the people who maintain it, not for an editor who has read the story.

People do the following:

Write and change the rules that decide what is about aviation, and the instructions the models follow.
Watch automated checks that run every hour on how many stories are published, how many are missing a brief and how many look off topic, and act on what they report.
Read corrections and complaints, check them against the sources and fix the story and its cause. See corrections.

When bad content shows up, we change the rule that let it through, so the same kind of story does not return. Stories that no longer pass a rule are removed from the lists, the search and the feeds.

Sources and attribution

Each story names the publishers behind it and links to their articles. The "Read the original" link goes to the lead publisher.
We write our own sentences from the facts. We do not copy a publisher's article. Where sources disagree, the story says so and cites both.
We show a publisher's picture only with its credit, and we do not use a publisher's picture as our share image. Our share images are made by us.
A publisher that does not want its content used can write to us through the contact page, and a publisher's robots.txt is always respected.

Languages

Many sources are not in English. Headlines are translated by a translation model and the story is written in English from facts extracted in the original language. A translation can lose detail, which is one reason every story links to its sources.

Columns, Ask and the bulletin

Columns are written by an AI model from cited sources and then checked by a second AI model against those sources. They are labelled as AI-written on the page. Ask answers a question from a handful of retrieved stories and shows its sources; if the sources do not answer, it says so. The daily bulletin has a short introduction written by an AI model from the day's headlines and summaries. See how we use AI.

Independence and advertising

Nobody pays to appear in a story, and we do not accept sponsored stories. When advertising is shown it sits in its own panel, is labelled, and has no effect on what we publish or how stories are ranked. Pro readers see no advertising.

When we get it wrong

Tell us at hello@terminair.com. The process and the log of corrections are on the corrections page.