Digital Flight Tickets/ Reports

[Wildrose]

I am curious of how many people out there are using digital tickets / flight reports. What kind of tablets are being used and how do they work for those using them. Good, Bad, Ugly????

 

I know that this would greatly decrease the paper workload and increase efficiency in maintainance scheduling, duty times all that good stuff. I've read up on flight office.com but wanted to get a feel for those using this technology.

 

Thank You in advance for any input.

[Bif]

I am curious of how many people out there are using digital tickets / flight reports. What kind of tablets are being used and how do they work for those using them. Good, Bad, Ugly????

 

I know that this would greatly decrease the paper workload and increase efficiency in maintainance scheduling, duty times all that good stuff. I've read up on flight office.com but wanted to get a feel for those using this technology.

 

Thank You in advance for any input.

 

I think you're going to need to run paper flight tickets for the foreseeable future, so you can get customer signatures, give them their copy etc... unless we all start trucking around those fancy handheld devices that Fedex/UPS uses

 

As for my company, I know we have to submit daily flight time reports using the crew website, and there's a digital version of the aircraft activity report... though I think it's still paper for the most part, we're definitely moving in that direction.

Officially, ipads are not supported by the company system

[inflowsurfer]

GSH has been pursuing a tablet based system for submitting flight tickets. Most of our machines that are out working at the moment are using them.

 

It's actually been quite successful so far. Surprisingly, the pilots haven't had many major complaints, and so far we've received very positive feedback from customers.

 

The tablet is a convertible netbook/tablet style computer with a keyboard and pen. We also provide a wireless USB datastick in case Internet isn't available by other means. The pilot can create flight tickets on the tablet, have the customer sign it, and submit them when he's able. Once they are submitted, our servers fire off emails to all the people on the ticket, as well as whatever customer email addresses are entered.

 

On the back-end side of things, the tickets are injected directly into our databases so that accounting can see them right away, and the crews can go on our company portal website and look up any tickets they've submitted or been included on.

 

In pretty short order, the flight tickets will populate the pilot's online CPR, which already does their flight and duty times automatically and also updates the airframe/cycles/etc for tech records. So hopefully once that aspect of the system is fully up and running, the pilot will simply have to submit a digital ticket, go into the company portal and confirm the details on his CPR and that's it. Done for the day. (excluding filling out the physical journey log book... for now).

 

For management it's extremely nice to be able to see the tickets every day for keeping track of fleet operations. Accounting loves it because they can bill the customer right away. Customers like it for the same reasons, plus getting the carbon copies of the tickets forwarded automatically to all the right people instantaneously. Another big benefit is how the tablets are intimately tied to our internal systems, so entry errors are nearly non-existent. Most fields on the ticket auto-complete for you with the right info. Selecting a job number automatically pulls up the customer details; when you select an aircraft, it fills in the aircraft type automatically; all of GSH pilot/engineers are listed in their respective drop downs, and so on. Also, a number of fields are required be filled in before you submit the ticket, so it prevents issues with tickets missing vital info.

 

Blah blah, how do I know so much about it? Well, I work for GSH (pilot and programmer) and I designed the system. I've yet to really come across another tablet solution that would work for the way we operate. Most seem to be geared more toward IFR ops.

 

Cheers!

[sven]

Inflowsurfer,

 

Sounds like very cool stuff.

 

I would be interested in some of the details regarding the nuts and bolts of this project.

 

I'm not a programmer, but still curious.

 

Cheers,

 

Sven

[displayname]

I think you're going to need to run paper flight tickets for the foreseeable future, so you can get customer signatures, give them their copy etc... unless we all start trucking around those fancy handheld devices that Fedex/UPS uses

 

As for my company, I know we have to submit daily flight time reports using the crew website, and there's a digital version of the aircraft activity report... though I think it's still paper for the most part, we're definitely moving in that direction.

Officially, ipads are not supported by the company system

 

 

i think paper is on its way out.. our company has been digital for 3 years.. customer signs the screen.

and in an internet inviorment. customer gets a copy sent to there head office and a copy to our accounts dept.. no more lost flight tickets and getting tickets in the mail.

[Wildrose]

Thanks inflowsurfer. This is definitely the way to go. What kind if start-up cost would be incurred for a 1-2 machine operation?

[ThreePer]

Inflowsurfer do you have a business website or something of the like? Would like to gather some more info about the system.

Thanks

[inflowsurfer]

Unfortunately, the system is not for sale... It's something that is being custom developed in-house from scratch for GSH and is very much still in the testing and development stage. I just thought it might be interesting -- not a sales a pitch. However, it’s nice to see that other companies are interested.

 

Maybe in the future we will package it up and offer it as a product to the rest of the aviation industry, but I'm not really in a position to speculate on that.

[inflowsurfer]

Inflowsurfer,

 

Sounds like very cool stuff.

 

I would be interested in some of the details regarding the nuts and bolts of this project.

 

I'm not a programmer, but still curious.

 

Cheers,

 

Sven

 

It's basically a Windows-based tablet program that communicates with an encrypted and password protected WCF web service operating off our servers. The web service accepts XML data, processes it, then returns confirmation details to the tablet client once the process is complete. The tablet flight ticket is technically an XML file that's between 10kb and 15kb in size, depending on how complicated the signature is, so transmission is typically really fast. The signature is encoded into base64 text so that it can be transmitted by XML, and then decoded on the other end to a binary image file.

[sven]

It's basically a Windows-based tablet program that communicates with an encrypted and password protected WCF web service operating off our servers. The web service accepts XML data, processes it, then returns confirmation details to the tablet client once the process is complete. The tablet flight ticket is technically an XML file that's between 10kb and 15kb in size, depending on how complicated the signature is, so transmission is typically really fast. The signature is encoded into base64 text so that it can be transmitted by XML, and then decoded on the other end to a binary image file.

 

 

Thanks for taking the time to explain the details.

I hope we will all be using a similar system in the very near future. The conventional paper trail is not very efficient.

 

Have a great season and fly safe.

 

Sven