Why do flight schools need maintenance and training in one system? According to Michael Rasmussen, Product Manager at FlightLogger, most disruption in flight training starts in the hangar: an aircraft becomes unairworthy, and the training department is the last to know. FlightLogger's new Maintenance Hub connects maintenance and flight training, so aircraft hours, airworthiness and maintenance bookings are shared in real time, with one source of truth for both teams. In the final episode of The Climb Briefing, he talks with FlightLogger CEO Kasper Valgren about getting training and maintenance in sync.
Michael Rasmussen is Product Manager at FlightLogger and owns the product roadmap. Before moving into product, he spent years on FlightLogger's client success team onboarding flight schools of every size. This is the final part of a short series; in part one, he covered combined syllabus, prerequisites and aircraft model requirements, and in part two, suggested scheduling.
Almost all of it, when it comes to flight training. Everything that happens in the air depends on maintenance, which makes it one of the most important parts of any flight training organization.
FlightLogger already tracks parts of maintenance, but on visits to client schools, Michael kept seeing the same thing: maintenance and training run in separate systems that don't talk to each other. Maintenance teams end up calling the training department to arrange things by hand. Because flight training is such a big part of FlightLogger, adding the maintenance link is a natural next step.
The biggest breakdown happens when something unplanned occurs. You can't skip maintenance: an aircraft is either airworthy or it isn't. When an airworthy aircraft suddenly becomes unairworthy, it disrupts the whole operation, from the planning and schedules to the people.
Everyone feels it: the maintenance team, who have to go out of their way, the schedulers, the instructors who were booked, and the student who shows up and can't fly. Ideally, the moment a defect makes an aircraft unairworthy, the training system should know which bookings are at risk and help rearrange them.
First, maintenance has to tell the training department that the aircraft is grounded. The next question is always: when will it be ready? Often nobody knows yet, because the team still has to investigate the defect and wait for parts.
Without an integration, the status of the aircraft becomes a black box. Maybe someone forgot to say it's ready tomorrow, or in three days. There's constant uncertainty, plus a lot of manual work copying hours and status between systems. In one connected system, both teams are updated in real time, and everyone is on the same page.
Maintenance Hub is maintenance software built for aviation academies. It's designed first for FlightLogger clients who do their maintenance in-house, with a full integration to FlightLogger.
All aircraft times are synced between the two systems, so there are never any discrepancies. Michael sees this often with schools using separate maintenance software today: the aircraft hours in FlightLogger don't match what's recorded in the maintenance system. Because it's safety-critical, there has to be one single truth, updated in both places at the same time.
The scope is broad: inventory and purchasing, the engineering side with work orders, airworthiness directives and safety letters. In Michael's words, there isn't an area an aviation academy doing maintenance would need that isn't on the roadmap.
A big focus is reporting and operational insights, where Michael finds today's maintenance systems weakest. Combining FlightLogger's flight data with maintenance data opens up questions schools can't easily answer today, such as how expensive each aircraft in a fleet is to maintain, and what maintenance costs per flight.
Michael calls it a full circle. Combined syllabus brings ground and flight training into one program. Prerequisites and aircraft model requirements are hard rules. Airworthiness is a rule too, and one that has to be enforced very seriously.
When an aircraft isn't airworthy, suggested scheduling takes that into account, looks at each student's progress on the combined syllabus, and recalculates the plan from all those inputs. The result is a smoother operation built on one source of truth.
Having training and maintenance in one connected system makes it much easier to show authorities that nothing non-compliant has happened. There are full change logs: if aircraft hours are changed in the maintenance system, it's logged, and if they come from FlightLogger, that's logged too.
That gives schools insight into their full operation, both day to day and when an audit comes around. As Kasper puts it, few things put more sweat on a flight school owner's forehead than an audit you don't feel ready for.
FlightLogger builds with its clients, not just for them. Maintenance Hub is being shaped together with design partners, maintenance professionals with 20, 30 and almost 40 years of experience.
Maintenance is a very different regulatory space from flight training, with many rules about what a system must and must not do. The team works with schools under EASA in Europe, the FAA in the United States, and in Canada, to find best practice in each regulatory space and turn it into templates, for example for Part 145 organizations. Every time one door closes, another opens.
Yes. The first focus is EASA and the FAA, reflecting FlightLogger's presence in Europe and North America, starting with clients in Europe, the United States and the UK. Other regulatory regions will follow, so that all FlightLogger clients can eventually use it.
The goal of the Flight School Operating System is that there's no part of an aviation academy's operation that FlightLogger isn't part of, either directly, through data from FlightLogger, or through Maintenance Hub.
Maintenance Hub is maintenance software for aviation academies, fully integrated with FlightLogger. It keeps aircraft hours, airworthiness status and maintenance bookings in sync between the maintenance and training departments, with one source of truth.
It's built first for FlightLogger clients who do their maintenance in-house. Schools that outsource maintenance still benefit from FlightLogger's maintenance tracking.
When an aircraft is scheduled for maintenance or becomes unairworthy, it appears in FlightLogger automatically, and suggested scheduling can suggest how to move bookings around it.
The first focus is EASA and the FAA, with clients in Europe, the United States and the UK, and other regulatory regions to follow.
FlightLogger is building Maintenance Hub with launch partners. Talk to your account manager, or book a demo or walkthrough.
Watch or listen to the full conversation with Michael Rasmussen, Product Manager at FlightLogger, on The Climb. Want to see how Maintenance Hub could work for your school? Talk to your account manager, or become a launch partner or book a demo.
The Climb — conversations from the world's most ambitious flight schools.