BETTER EVERYTHING MICRO LEVEL COMPLIANCE

New Scheduler, Download All Records & v3.4 “Shooting Star”

23rd August, 2022
Releases
5
Sam Webster

Sam Webster

Software Developer

The Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star was the first of its kind and in this release we introduce our new, 100% in-house developed scheduling platform, purpose built from the ground up for aviation. Plus you can now download all the lesson records for a student in one go. Let’s dive in and see all it has to offer!

New Scheduler

We have launched our new scheduler! It’s been purpose built in house by our team specifically for aviation & flight scheduling. Rather than try to make something off the shelf work, which kept presenting us with limitations, we made the decision to build our own scheduler from the ground up. Many of you in our Launchpad program have already been using this for some time, but from today it’s available to everyone as we retire the old scheduler.

Scheduler Detailed View

For those that have been using the new scheduler already, you will notice there are still many, many improvements in this release. Many parts of the engine that power the scheduler have been re-written to make it faster and more efficient, with load times reduced drastically in some areas. We also revamped the way events look, to make it easier on the eyes but also provide rich detail at a glance about the status of the event and if associated, the flight.

You provided over 100 responses as we asked for feedback while we developed this scheduler, many of these items have since been integrated. In this release there is now the much requested linked event dragging, so you can drag a pre-flight, flight and debrief all as one. You may need to spend some time getting a feel for how this works, it can be easily turned on or off by pressing the chain link icon on the top right of the toolbar or by pressing L on your keyboard to make it turn blue. The scheduler documentation has been updated for all the details, but basically linked dragging works into the future, not the past. So if you drag a pre-flight, it will also drag the flight and debrief. If you drag the debrief, only the debrief will drag. This is intentional, to allow you to better offset and stagger events from each other, saving the need to turn linked dragging on and off every time you want a gap between them. Trust us, after a little time, it will all click… and drag…

We have now made it super easy to filter the whole schedule by the resources availability. Press A on your keyboard, or open the filters section from the toolbar (Press F on your keyboard for that) to change which resources are shown, based on their availability. There are three options. “All”, which shows every resource, booked or not. “Scheduled”, which only shows resources which have a booking in that time. Last is “Unscheduled”, which only shows resources that do not have a booking in that time.

Using the keyboard shortcuts will make it very fast to flick between views, filters and functions, to see a condensed view of what’s going on that day, without rows and rows of resources with nothing going on. It will also make it easy to pick out resources not being utilised and ensure they are too. We think the teams and people who spend a lot of time scheduling will benefit greatly from these productivity enhancements.

Finally, your filters, view settings, site selection and more will be stored so when you visit the scheduler again, all of that should be maintained between visits.

Scheduler Simple View

Downloading All Lesson Records

You asked for it and now you can now download all the lesson records for a student in one go. To use this new feature visit the “Students” area which you can access from the menu, then find the student, then the course and press the “Generate PDFs” button, this will open an overlay where you can select where you want the records to go and which type of lesson record you want generated. The merged PDF is a good one to get started with and have a play, plus it’s just one single PDF rather than 50+ for a large integrated CPL course or similar.

Download PDF Records Overlay

Creating Multiple Accounts

Lately we have had a couple of people have trouble with their account where they have maybe made one under a work email, and another under their personal email. This may seem good in the short term, but it will only make using the system harder as time goes on, logbooks, licences, medicals and flight & duty times will all get out of whack and trying to merge them all back into one account is a precarious operation that we can only do sometimes, based on the trail of records left by each account.

So please just use one account, we want you to have the best experience and that comes by using one login. If you have privacy concerns, have lost access to the email address, changed jobs, or need help with your account in any way, we are more than happy to help restore access and get you back up and running. We don’t want you having to enter all your information, logbooks, etc, all over again.

The Rest

The team thinks this is our largest release ever with nearly 20 feature additions, and over 60 tweaks & fixes. We have added the New Scheduler and the ability to download all a Student’s lesson records, but we have also worked hard on many other pieces of feedback, bugs, stability enhancements, and new features.

To name a few there is now a Flight & Duty CSV export, changing and viewing event and flight status, better “active” setting of people who act as multiple resources, more filters for the events report, clearer lesson deletion, nicer rubric editing, better previous logbook/maintenance hours detection for flight returns on aircraft that use zero based “stopwatch” timers, removal of duplicate logbook entries, and it just goes on. Check out the release notes for the full list.

Wrap Up

That’s it for this one. Thanks to everyone who has been reporting issues and giving us feedback, so much of every release is due to what you want and what you report, we love making the system work harder for you not the other way around and we hope this release really helps you all and improves the system. Back to the code cave for us! Until next time!

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