Originally Posted by Old Smokey
I think that you'll find that it gets back to a legal issue.
Owners / Operators / AOC holders for all aircraft are required to keep amendments promptly up to date for all POH's. There would be no control of amendment status of the POH if it were privately available 'off the net' or from some other unofficial source.
I can understand that issue well, although I've never seen or been advised about any POH amendments for any of the light planes I've been flying since '72. I get the impression that 99.9999% of the manual, esp. the performance statistics don't change year on year for a specific model, so my new suggestion is that there should be a 'data sheet' - for want of a better description - which has no legal staus (print BIG disclaimer on every page referring to the POH as the ultimate authority) which repeats much if not most of the stuff in the POH, like Vspeeds, performance graphs, t/o and ldg distances, weight & balance, etc.
In my Jepp Instrument Commercial Manual, there are approach plates aplenty with no disclaimer and not dated. How did these get past the lawyers? How many people are out there screwing up approaches by using this out-of-date information because it doesn't say you can't?
Any pilot clever enough to think this one through should be trusted to exercise the same judgement with POH data provided through an alternate channel with suitable annotations.