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The Calendar

The internet is filled with booking systems, almost all digital systems rely on time or scheduled events in some form to operate. This means there are a lot of booking systems out there already, some good, some bad and some _very_ bad. So how do we compare? What have we done to stand out, and what are we doing to stay current.

Well, for a start we don’t believe in reinventing the wheel, we use a lot of open source software in our technology, and also give a lot back. When it comes to dates and calendars, there is a LOT of software out there to choose from. We use one of the internets most popular and active calendars, which is very extensible and constantly updated.

Building on the foundation

With that very solid starting block, we have continued to build, augmenting the out of the box features with more open source products and custom code to ensure that our calendar and booking system does everything we need it to do while being user friendly. And in that, we have succeeded.

We believe that our booking system, with regards to the calendar but also the users flow through the system is flexible and simple, while at the same time working on a huge range of different devices customising the layout and features depending on the size and platform of the client device.

So what… just another booking system

Well yes… and no. Our booking page is at the heart of our flying club system and a key component in our aviation school system too. Straight from the main booking page, you can quickly get an overview of your bookings, create new ones, see plane and instructor availability and of course manage your existing bookings. In the club system you can access your booking reports from here, and from the school system you can access or create a lesson directly from the calendar. It’s the entry point into the system for most of our users, so it’s important that it’s intuitive and a rock solid part of the system.

In addition to the calendar itself, there are a number of calendar related features in the system that make the system complete. For example, from your profile page you can create an ICS calendar subscription link which you can use to show your Wings bookings in your own calendar. Most calendars support this, such as Google and Apple, and then you have all of your important bookings in a single view, in your favourite calendar app.

Save the date

Dates are important, much of what happens in Wings is based on events. Managing pilot currency, aircraft services, and yes, also bookings. Wings uses a number of technologies to ensure that we always deliver the best service to you, on time 🙂

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Inspiration behind Oscar Yankee and Wings

I am a “computer nerd” or “geek” first and foremost, playing with technology has always been my passion from a very young age. It wasn’t until later in life that I decided to get into flying.

Flying always seemed like it should be the most advanced technology in the world, next to space travel of course, imagine my surprised when I was asked to climb into a C150 from 1963 held together with nothing but gafa-tape and a few loose screws.

This was just the tip of the iceberg, aviation is actually an industry filled with regulation, documentation and process, but not a great deal of technology, so it wasn’t long before I found a few things I thought could be helped with a sprinkle of software and maybe even a dash of hardware too!

It starts…

I got talking to my instructor at the time, asking him how he manages bookings, it seemed chaotic, but he was an older guy and didn’t like the idea of using one of the many free and open online booking solutions. So I offered to help. Initially I made a very basic booking system for him, yes it was a little bit of reinventing the wheel, which I’m not a huge fan of, but I did it so my then instructor could reduce some of the chaos in his life.

Then slowly slowly, I started bolting on some additional features, such as aircraft, and adding the concept of an instructor to the system so that students could book a specific plane and a specific instructor. Now Wings was no longer just another off-the-shelf booking system, now it was an industry specific tool – At least in the making.

Gaining momentum

Once we had instructors in the system, the next natural question was, was if a plane or instructor was unavailable, how do we tell the system that – So we added a flexible availability system in for the instructors and allowed marking planes to service. But that seems like a lot of work, wouldn’t it be nicer if the system could tell us in advance if planes needed servicing of if instructors’ currency needed to be updated? Yes! And so the warning and alert system was born.

From here it snowballed into a fully fledged Flight School Management solution, supporting an EASA compliant Safety Management System (SMS) and powerful lesson progress, execution and reporting for schools, and some unique club features such as accounting, invoice generation and booking reports.

The system continues to grow in much the same way. We of course have plans on what we’re building next, but often customers say “It’s great, but it would be EVEN better if it just did <feature x>”, so then we build feature x.

Wings has grown from a small booking system into an enterprise level aviation management platform, and we are very proud of it. Oscar Yankee has a number of other projects too. For example, we have had a bit of a side project called World Flight Guide which is a community driven global listing of airfields, along with their current weather information. The system is driven by an open API that we have given back to the community providing fast lookup of airfields, current and historic weather data and other useful aviation data.

What’s next?

TrueTrack is our first hardware/software endeavour, we are working on an ADS-B in enabled device that not only provides you with traffic and weather data, but will track all of your flight information in real time to the cloud, allowing for you to track your students in detail while they’re flying solo, or allowing you to play back a flight dissecting it one bank at a time to help your students better learn from their practical sessions. Clubs and plane owners can also use this innovative device to understand how their planes are being used, and set alerts for when a specific flight metric exceeds a predefined limit.

Oscar Yankee’s mission is to modernise GA through technology, so who knows what else we’ll be working on in the future. If you have some thoughts or ideas about an area of aviation that needs the “Oscar Yankee treatment”, then please let us know. We are all aviation enthusiasts and want to give back to the GA community. You can contact us directly at hello@oscaryankee.com

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This is me

So I’m Pete Warnes, halfbreed (English/Danish), geek and aviation enthusiast.

I have always wanted to fly, my first (GA) flying experience was in the form of a helicopter lesson, my wife had bought it for me as a gift. Despite being a little afraid of heights, I loved it.

I was bouncing off the walls when we came back down, and I was determined to learn to fly, until I saw how much it costs to learn to fly a helicopter… That was the end of that dream.

A few years later…

A few years later I again had the opportunity to fly, this time with my uncle, in San Fransisco. We flew from San Jose, up to Half Moon Bay for a Burrito before flying over the Golden Gate Bridge and back down through the bay. It was truly inspiring to get those views. When we landed I got some information from the club, though that was in the US, and I lived in England at the time. After returning home I just didn’t follow up on it.

A few more years go by (about 6), now we live in Denmark. Again my family bought a “Pilot for a day” gift for my birthday, which is basically a quick ground school, briefing and flight. I loved every minute of it, even just nosing around the plane, being allowed to touch it and press buttons while it was on the ground.

Right this was it! I signed up to start the theory the following week, and the next course started a month later which I signed up for. Great! Finally I did it… but no, it was not meant to be. The school I’d signed up to had decided they only wanted commercial pilots and cancelled their part time ground school courses, which meant that the course I was on was no longer going ahead.

This was the closest school to where I lived, and the prospect of driving 3 hours 4 times a week to take the next furthest school wasn’t appealing, so once again, time slipped by.

Finally

Then, just by chance, I found a ground school in Aarhus town, just 30 minutes from where I live, this was it, why had I not heard about this before?! I called them up, unfortunately I then found that the school had been moved up to Randers, but that wasn’t so bad, just an hour drive away. I was invited to come along to the theory lessons, a new course had just started and I’d missed the first two, but the instructor seemed to think I would be able to catch up. So I figured, why not.

That was February 10th 2017, I got my licence on August 27th 2017. It was intense, I had decided that this was my one and only opportunity, I’d put it off long enough. I made getting my license the highest priority, higher than my job, and for a short period, even higher than my family and friends – Whatever it took.

I’m so pleased I finally did it. Others on my course had spent much of their working life saving up, and where now in their 50s and finally learning to fly… It felt like I had waited a long time, and wasted those years, but meeting these people who had been dreaming about it for even longer than me, and waited until they where much older than I was, I realised how lucky I was to have done it while I still have (hopefully) many years to enjoy it.

I guess if I had some advice for those out there that dream about flying, but don’t have the time, or don’t have the money… I say this – Every year you wait, is a year you could be a pilot and living your dreams. You will never have enough time, you will never have enough money. You just need to make it happen, and worry about the rest later. After all, flying is a great stress reliever 🙂

/Pete