Meet Take Flight Ops
Built around the airplane, for flight schools, flying clubs, maintenance shops, and the people who own the aircraft. Scheduling, dispatch, maintenance, training records and billing in one system, with the regulations enforced as you work.
What do you run?
And what kind of operation is it?
How many aircraft?
Who does your maintenance?
Do you train under Part 141?
Who it is for
Each of these is a first-class use of the product, not a setting bolted onto something built for somebody else. A club with its own shop and two leaseback owners is three of them at once, on one subscription.
What it does
Scheduling, maintenance and billing all read the same aircraft and the same people. Sign off an inspection and the schedule knows about it before anybody is dispatched against that tail.
See it without asking anyone
Tell it how many aircraft you have and what kind of operation you run, and it builds one that size with a week of flying already in it. Nothing to install. Nobody to talk to.
iPhone and iPad
Not a viewer and not a cut-down companion. Everything the browser does, in your pocket, working at the airplane.
Check a tail out at the tiedown. Open a squawk with the cowling still off. Sign an inspection where you did the work. The front desk has a laptop; the people flying and fixing do not.
Get the app
Also on the web, Windows and macOS. Every platform is included, with no per-device charge.
Who built it
A team of certificated flight instructors who work in flight operations and got tired of watching schools and shops run on whiteboards, spreadsheets, and software that treated the aircraft as an afterthought. When you call about something that is not working, you are talking to people who fly.
Pricing
Schools and operators pay by aircraft. Shops pay by mechanic. Everybody gets unlimited users, so the whole roster is included however many of them there are. We never take a percentage of what you bring in.
One airplane, one record
Airworthiness is part of dispatch, not a report somebody runs on Friday. Overdue inspection, open airworthiness squawk: the tail stops releasing, and whoever reached for it sees which item stopped it.
Ground a tail at seven in the morning and four flights need a home. Each one opens with up to three alternatives, ranked on model, then panel, then year, then IFR, then field. Only what is airworthy, free for the whole slot, and legal for that pilot; a 141 student is offered 141 aircraft. Each one says why it is there. One tap moves the flight.
The inspection comes due and the tail stops releasing, with the reason on the schedule beside it. Bookings on it are held for you to move.
Filed at the airplane with a photo. On the board before the pilot is inside, and if it is airworthiness the tail is grounded from that moment.
Signed with the certificate number. The logbook entry writes itself and the tail releases on the signature.
Entered at check-in, it moves the maintenance clock, prices the flight and credits the instructor. Read once, at the airplane.
Work orders, parts and return to service come with Operations and Academy. Squawks and the flight log are in every plan.
Part 141
Your syllabus here is your approved TCO. Stages and lessons as the FAA approved them, and stage checks only a designated check instructor can grade. The software holds the rule.
The 141 side is Academy. Every plan does Part 61 syllabi, grading and endorsements.
Scheduling and dispatch
Every tail on one screen: what is booked, what is airborne, what is running late, and what the shop has taken.
Reach for a tail somebody already has and the nearest free airplane comes up with the conflict.
A maintenance block holds the bookings under it instead of canceling them. Work finishes early, the people on those flights are told, and they go.
Checkout wants a current medical, verified citizenship and a live solo endorsement, and names the one that is missing. Booking still goes through; it is the checkout that stops. Dual is untouched.
On the phone
A real app on the App Store. Instructors and students work out of it on the ramp.
Money, both directions
The schedule already knows who flew what, how long, and with whom. Billing and instructor pay come off that record.
Hobbs at check-in prices the flight at that tail's rate, adds instructor time, posts to the student's account. Balances, prepaid blocks and holds on one page.
Payments run on Stripe, who handle the card and bank side for a good share of the internet. Being a Stripe partner means a card number never touches our servers or yours, and the compliance that comes with holding them is theirs.
A few minutes during onboarding and it is done. Students pay by card or bank transfer, the money lands in your account on your payout schedule, and the dashboard for payouts, refunds and disputes is there when you want it.
A subscription, and that is all of it. Stripe's processing fee is Stripe's and we add nothing to it. If we took even one percent, most schools would be paying us more than the subscription costs.
Flight and ground at each instructor's rate, totaled for the period, every line there to check. Submit and the hours and gross go to QuickBooks Payroll.
Student billing and payments are in every plan; instructor pay and the payroll handoff start at Operations.
It fits what you already use
What a school already runs on keeps working, and you arrive with your flight history rather than a blank page.
Which plan
The line between them is what the operation does. Rates are on the pricing page.
A club, or a school that flies airplanes and teaches in them. Scheduling and dispatch, Part 61 training records, student billing and payments, the app, one base.
Everything above, and your own maintenance: work orders, parts, labor and return to service. Instructor pay, TSA security training records, the walk-in sign-up kiosk, and up to three bases.
Everything above, and Part 141: approved courses, stage checks, 141 designation per aircraft. Reports that arrive on a schedule, and as many bases and locations as you run.
In every plan
What each person sees
One record for the whole school. A mechanic, an owner, a chief pilot, an instructor and a student each open to the part they answer for.
Rates, locations, integrations and billing stay with management.
See it with your own fleet
Tell it how many aircraft you fly and which certificate you hold, and it builds that school with a week of flying already on the schedule. Ground a tail and watch what happens to the flights that were on it.
Coming off MyFBO? It retired August 31, 2026 — here is what moving a school across involves.
Work orders
Open it from a squawk, an inspection coming due, or an AD. It arrives carrying the tail, the times, and everything already open against that airplane.
Check tasks off at the bench, pull parts against the tail, log labor as it is worked. The stock count moves on its own and the part lands on that aircraft's cost history.
Two tasks still open and it says so. Close it anyway and the record shows they were not done. Nobody has to reconstruct that six months later.
Date, tail, total time, tach, time since overhaul, the work described, every part number and quantity, labor hours, and this over your name and certificate:
I certify that this aircraft has been inspected/repaired in accordance with current regulations and is approved for return to service with respect to the work performed.
Filed against the aircraft as a document the moment you close it.
Not everyone who touches the airplane carries a login. Their name and certificate number go on the entry exactly the same way.
Customer aircraft
A shop works on whatever rolls through the door. An owner's airplane, a club's, a charter operator's, a school's. Each tail carries whoever owns it and a number to call them on, and not one of them lands on a schedule.
Parts and inventory
Every part that goes on an airplane came off a shelf and belongs on an invoice. Both happen when the mechanic pulls it, before anyone gets to the paperwork.
A minimum per part number. At or below it, the part shows in red on the inventory page with the rest of the shortfalls.
Order what the work needs without leaving it, and receive it when it lands. A partial delivery is tracked against what is still coming.
Part numbers held, how many are at or below minimum, and the value of the stock. Three numbers at the top of the page.
If you service a school's fleet
Plenty of shops never touch a school airplane, and nothing above depends on it. But if the school whose fleet you keep running is on this system too, closing the work order is the last step there is.
What it costs
A shop's work scales with the people turning wrenches. How many tails come through the door in a month is your business. Rates are on the pricing page.
What a shop gets
See it with aircraft on the floor
It builds a shop with aircraft already in work. Take one from the squawk to the signature and read the logbook entry that comes out.
Part 91 · owner-flown
You own it and you fly it. What the software holds is the airplane, what is due on it, and what a trip costs you — nobody is invoiced for an hour in your own aircraft. If a company keeps aircraft for the people who need them, that is a flight department and it has its own pages.
That is the whole of it. Rates and a fuel price sit behind the trip cost so you can see what a flight costs you to fly, and nothing in here tries to bill anybody.
Four roles, named for who is actually in the hangar. The owner sets the rates and the rules, the pilot takes the airplane, the mechanic signs it off, and the user is whoever needs it somewhere without flying it himself.
One airplane is a whole operation and it is priced as one. There is no fleet size to reach before the numbers start making sense.
Two pilots and one airplane need somewhere to sort out who has it. Flying alone, you can switch the whole thing off.
The airplane
What is due, what is open against the airplane, and what the record says you did about it.
Before you go
The schedule holds nine until three because that is when the airplane is away. Three of those hours are spent in the air, and it is the three that buy the fuel and move the clock toward the next inspection. Most software asks for one number and then quietly uses it for both.
Great-circle distance between them, divided by that airplane's cruise speed, plus two tenths over three for taxi, climb, descent and the pattern. There and back doubles it. No wind is allowed for and it tells you so, and an aircraft with no cruise speed on file says that too and points at where to put one.
The airplane at its hourly rate for the hours actually flown. Fuel appears as its own line only when the rate does not already contain it, because a wet rate that gets a fuel line on top makes every trip look dearer than it is.
The one figure nobody works out in their head: how much of the time remaining before the next inspection this trip would use. It sits on the trip alongside the cost.
Airport identifiers are kept rather than coordinates. A field can move on the chart, and the identifier is what anyone will recognize reading the schedule back a year later.
Which one
Rates are on the pricing page. Neither plan has a minimum number of aircraft.
You own the airplane and you fly it. Inspections, ADs, squawks, the logbook and documents, currency warnings, the trip cost, and a schedule you can turn off.
The company owns the aircraft and people ask for them. Everything on this page, and trip requests with an approval chain, turbine aircraft, cycles, a minimum equipment list and a second pilot on the flight.
Neither includes the shop half of maintenance, which is parts drawn against a job, labor costed and an invoice at the end. That is what a maintenance shop runs on, and you are not quietly paying for it here.
See it with your own airplane
It builds an operation your size with hours already on it. Run an inspection down to overdue and watch the airplane stop releasing.
Part 91 · flight department
Two or three aircraft, a handful of pilots, a mechanic on contract, and a schedule driven by whoever needs to be somewhere. What the software holds is which aircraft is legal to go, which crew is current to take it, who asked for the trip, and what it cost.
There are no students, no invoices and no rental rates in here unless you want a cost per trip for your own reporting. The money side of a flight school is not switched on and you are not paying for it.
Four roles. The requester is whoever needs the airplane without flying it himself: he gets the schedule and the request form and nothing else — not the maintenance history, not the documents, not the other people.
Three aircraft is priced as three aircraft. There is no fleet size to reach before the numbers work.
Pilots, contract maintenance, schedulers, the people who ask for the airplane, management. Priced per aircraft, never per seat.
Turbine aircraft
Most of what keeps a turbine aircraft legal is written against numbers a piston single does not have. Software built for trainers asks for the wrong ones and then does arithmetic on them.
The crew
A pilot in command of a type-rated aircraft is held to a proficiency check every twelve calendar months, and that is a different date from a flight review.
Tracked with its own expiry alongside the certificate, the medical and recurrent training, and visible before the airplane is scheduled rather than after.
A pilot with that check inside twenty-four months does not need a flight review, under 61.56(d). So a lapsed flight review on a jet pilot is reported as satisfied rather than raised as an alarm — because a page that cries wolf is one people stop reading.
It stops at six thousand pounds and six occupants. If BasicMed is on file against an aircraft it cannot legally cover, you are told so, with the registration named.
The dates are in front of whoever builds the schedule, not filed somewhere to be checked later.
If people have to ask for the airplane
An owner who flies his own airplane needs none of this and does not get charged for it. A flight department flying the company's airplane runs on it.
The aircraft
The same airworthiness side an owner-flown aircraft gets, on every tail in the fleet.
Intervals in hours, calendar time or cycles, on your own inspection program rather than a trainer's. Overdue and the aircraft stops releasing, with the item that stopped it named.
Filed at the aircraft with a photo. One against airworthiness grounds it until somebody signs it off, and an override is recorded with a reason and a name.
Your contract mechanic signs off against the item, with a certificate number, and the entry stays on the tail.
What each aircraft has actually cost to keep, per hour flown, rather than a number somebody reconstructs at the end of the year.
What is not here, and not charged for: the shop half of maintenance — parts drawn against a job, labor costed, an invoice at the end. That is what a maintenance shop runs on. Nor Part 141 course structure, student ledgers or TSA Flight Training Security Program records, which are flight school functions.
Which one
Rates are on the pricing page. Neither plan has a minimum number of aircraft.
The company owns the aircraft and people ask for them. Everything an owner gets, and trip requests with an approval chain, cost per trip, cycles, a minimum equipment list, a second pilot on the flight and turbine fuel in the weight and balance.
One airplane, flown by the person who owns it, with no requests and no approvals to run.
See it with your own fleet
It builds an operation your size with hours already on it. Defer something against an MEL and let the interval run out, and watch the aircraft stop releasing.
Compliance
Recordkeeping is expected of everyone. Stopping the mistake before it happens is the part that is worth paying for.
A grounded aircraft, or one inside a maintenance window, does not leave. Management can override it, and the override takes a typed reason and is kept permanently with the name against it. 14 CFR 91.405
A student in an approved course is not offered a non-141 aircraft when booking, and is refused at dispatch. A new tail sits as pending FSDO approval until it is signed off. 14 CFR 141
An instructor whose security awareness training has lapsed cannot be scheduled with a student until a current record is on file. An expired record blocks dispatch whatever else is configured. 49 CFR 1552.23
Verified before training begins, and the copy is retained for five years without anyone having to remember that it must be. 49 CFR 1552
Who changed what
Most systems log that something was edited. This one keeps what it said before, which is the only version of that question anybody ever actually asks.
Signatures
A signature is worth something only while the thing it was put on has not moved underneath it.
The instructor grades and signs it, and the student signs it too. Neither of them can quietly rewrite it afterward, which protects both of them and not only the school.
The mechanic's name and certificate go into the logbook entry with the work, the times and the parts. The entry is filed against the aircraft where an inspector would look for it. 14 CFR 43.9
Free text rather than a menu, because AC 61-65 carries far more endorsements than any list short enough to scroll. It keeps the register. You still write the endorsement in their logbook and sign it there, exactly as you always have.
When somebody asks for the records
An inspector, an insurer, or an examiner looking at one applicant. All three ask for different things, and none of them wants to hear that you will have to get back to them.
See it before you need it
Run an inspection past due in the demo and take the airplane anyway. It will tell you what stopped you, make you type a reason, and put your name on it.
What we are building
A flight school, a maintenance shop and a man with one airplane all keep their real records on Take Flight Ops: the schedule, the aircraft, the work orders, the people. The network lets them find each other.
Aviation already runs on who you know. This is the same thing for the people you have not met yet, and every operation on it uses it for its own business.
What that looks like
Two trades that happen on every field in the country, and currently happen by asking around.
Your records stay yours
Your operation does not become public, now or later. It works one item at a time and every one of them is yours to approve first: this instructor is looking for a seat, this shop has a slot in March. Your schedule, your aircraft, your students and your records are never part of it.
We are building it now, and it is the part of all this we are most looking forward to handing over.
What's new
Shipped to every customer as it was finished. Nothing here is on a roadmap — it is all in the software now.
Pricing
Pick the tier by what you are responsible for, not by how many aircraft you have. A two-aircraft school doing its own maintenance belongs on Operations. If nobody is paying you to fly — it is your airplane, or your company's — the Part 91 rates below the table are the ones that apply, and they carry no minimum.
| Fleet | Essentials | Operations | Academy |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 aircraft | $48 | $140 | $390 |
| 4 aircraft | $96 | $140 | $390 |
| 10 aircraft | $240 | $350 | $650 |
| 30 aircraft | $720 | $1,050 | $1,950 |
A club splits it. Three aircraft on Essentials is $72 a month, which across thirty members is $2.40 each — rather less than an hour of dues a year.
Not a sample account with invented aircraft — your own operation, running free for thirty days.
No card needed to start. We won't add you to a mailing list, and nobody calls unless you ask.
We read everything and reply from a real address.
Or write to ops@takeflightops.com directly.
