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