Student / pilot monitoring software

[whyisitsohard]

Im after a bit of software that allows a group of about a hundred or so pilots to monitor the licences and drop-dead dates of biannuals etc. I'm the CFI of this group and I want to take us from the masses of paper forms littering my office and pop everyone onto a single spreadsheet instead.

If I add the dates of biannuals etc it seems to be easy for the programme to yell at me when a stude or group member is getting close to being illegal, as well as telling them the same thing well in advance.

Does anyone know of such a thing? And it must be cheap.

David

['India-Mike]

One place I work at uses something called goboko for online booking, but it's also got an area for just the use you describe.

[Genghis the Engineer]

In my spare (ha!) time I run a Jiu Jitsu club, where current licences are just as important - since an expired licence means no insurance, which means all hell breaks loose if somebody gets injured.

I do it all in Excel - the spreadsheet took me about an hour to write.

If you don't have MS Office, or any equivalent office package, download OpenOffice, which is a free equivalent. For my day-job OpenOffice is NBG, but for something simple like this, it should do the job fine.

G

[stuartforrest]

Hi there, looks like more than one of us has been producing a free solution. Take a look at ours and see what you think. It is and will always remain free and for the good of the community.

Here is our welcome letter:

Just to let you know that with immediate effect our new booking system for for aircraft/groups/instructors is available. You will need to login and create an account as the administrator of your group and then add all the other pilots and planes and instructors. Its a painless process and it will will send all your pilots an email along the way to tell them they have been activated.

Like many of the people who will use this system I was dissapointed when the booking system we used, GoBoKo announced a charging structure that wasnt cheap so I have invested the first couple of years of what I would have spent to write our own booking system which does all what the previous one did. In addition I am providing the service free of charge to the aviation community so nobody else has to pay. The address of the new system is Aircraft Bookings and you can find out more about the system at Welcome to the Free Aircraft Booking Sytem - FABS

If there are any problem with the system please let me know as it is hot off the press so we may have missed something.

It is pretty self explanatory to use.

1. register the group and main admin pilot

2. Add a plane or planes

3. Add pilots

Thats it. You are ready to go.

You can add bookings by clicking on the start time and then the end time in the calendar or you can also add them by selecting the times under the calender and you can select the end day if it later than the start day of the booking.

You can also book instructors by ticking a box while ticking a plane. We will hopefully add later today so you can book instructors without the need to book a plane for groundschool etc.

We will try to include any suggestions people make although as it is free there is no promises. Just ask nicely and we will see what we can do.

Please give me your feedback. [email protected]

Remember the only payment is that you put a link on your website if you have one back to our siste to help it get found by the search engines and so other pilots can track us down. Please link to Welcome to the Free Aircraft Booking Sytem - FABS (the website) not aircraftbookingsystem (the actual booking system)

Thanks

Stuart

[Whopity]

I've never found anything that beats a sheet of perspex and a chinagraph pen for speed, simplicity, clarity and cost.

[rmcb]

Microsoft schedule is excellent for this sort of timeline stuff.

[Whopity]

One of the biggest problems with this sort of information is visibility. People go out of currency because they have not noticed. The information is in every pilots licence/logbook but they don't look. Whilst there are many software solutions, it still depends upon the visibility of that information, and in most cases, that will require a system which automatically flags up dates as they get close. Incidentally, there are no such things as "bianuals" which mean twice a year! There is not even a requirement for a biennial, it is but one option in a multi choice process.