Dispatch keeps booking authority. Students do not self-book.
Aircraft, instructor, and student have to line up before a training flight is real. OmniFlyer schedules all three together and refuses the combinations that do not work.
A club booking has one moving part: is this aeroplane free? A training booking has three. The aircraft must be available and serviceable, the instructor must be available and current on type, and the student must be free and at the right stage to fly the lesson. Any one of those failing wastes a slot that somebody else could have used.
Schools that run this on a whiteboard or a shared calendar end up with a dispatcher whose entire job is holding the three-way constraint in their head. It works, expensively, until they take a day off.
Flight school scheduling software exists to make those constraints the system's problem. A booking that puts an instructor in two aeroplanes at once should be impossible to save, not something a human notices at seven the next morning.
Students can see the schedule and request, but they cannot commit an aircraft. Every training flight is confirmed by an instructor or a dispatcher, because a pre-solo student is not the right person to decide whether today's flight goes. The permission model is explicit rather than a matter of policy nobody enforces.
CFIs record their own availability and time off, and the schedule respects it. Double-booking an instructor is refused the same way double-booking an airframe is refused, so the person who discovers the clash is the person making it — not the student who drove an hour to the field.
Who is teaching whom is recorded rather than remembered, which matters most on the days it changes. When a CFI calls in sick, you can see every student affected and what each was booked to fly instead of reconstructing it from a calendar.
Grounding an aircraft pulls it from the schedule immediately and shows dispatch every booking that just became a problem. Squawks are raised from the ramp with a photo and tracked to sign-off, so the maintenance conversation is not happening in three WhatsApp groups.
Tach and Hobbs go in as the flight closes, and the airframe total moves with them. For a school flying the same aeroplanes six times a day, the difference between hours that are current and hours that are a fortnight stale is the difference between planning maintenance and reacting to it.
Every booking and every amendment is attributed and timestamped. When a lesson is moved twice and nobody can agree who moved it, the answer is a lookup rather than a conversation.
There is no syllabus tracking, no lesson-by-lesson training record, and no student billing. For a Part 141 or ATO operation those are not optional extras, so we will tell you plainly that OmniFlyer is not a complete school-management system today.
What it does cover is the operational layer: dispatch-controlled scheduling, instructor and aircraft availability, fleet serviceability, and flight-time capture. Some schools run that alongside the training records they already keep. If you need the whole thing in one product this year, we are not it, and we would rather say so before you spend a month evaluating us.
Not by default, and that is deliberate. Students can see availability and request a slot, but an instructor or dispatcher confirms it. Schools that want a more permissive setup for solo-cleared students can widen the permission per role.
Yes. Instructors are scheduled resources in the same sense aircraft are, so an overlapping assignment is rejected when it is saved rather than flagged afterwards. CFI time off and availability windows feed the same check.
No. Training records and syllabus tracking are on the roadmap but are not shipped. OmniFlyer version 1 is the operational layer: scheduling, dispatch, fleet visibility, and flight-time capture.
Not yet. There is no invoicing and no card processing. If billing is the problem you are solving this quarter, a more mature product is the right call today.
Grounding it removes it from the schedule at once and surfaces the bookings that are now affected, so dispatch can re-plan deliberately instead of finding out one lesson at a time.
Yes. Booking authority is set per role, so self-service members and dispatch-controlled students can share one fleet. Our flying club management software page covers the club side.
Tell us your fleet size and how many instructors you run. We will come back within a working day, including if we think we are the wrong fit.