Hello from Auckland, New Zealand! I'm Stefan, one of the developers of Smart and I’m responsible for, among other things, most of the code that makes the Smart Mobile application work. In this post I'm going to cover what's in store for the app in the coming months and years.

I suggest making a cup of tea and settling into a comfy chair, as I'm a bit of a talker when I get going... Forgive my authentically Kiwi, dry self-deprecating sense of humor. If I make myself laugh at least that's one person.

Now you're holding the app in your hot little hands, you may have questions - one being "is that it?". We knew we would receive that criticism and in terms of a customer's view - fair! It's an agenda, and push notifications - and those notifications don't even do anything useful! Our first Google Play Store review (yet unpublished as we still only have one) was a one-star banger:

"nothing like the web version very limited in its use" - ★1 / 5

That review’s correctness is likely to be evergreen - the purpose of the app is not to replace the web app, but to be a companion to it. I was a pilot in a high-performing flight school for over a decade, and it took being a software engineer to develop the thick skin I needed to learn that if you hear nothing, you're doing a good job.

The initial release was purposely feature-light, and to be as solid a foundation as we could achieve. This allows future features to be added that are solid, fast, reliable, offline-capable, and feel good in your hand. Build a house on sand - well, you know the fable.

Coming up

I'm never satisfied. My job is never done. I wish I could code 10 times faster and ship 10 times more features. I wish I could give you everything that I always dreamed of in an app when I was a practicing pilot, long before I joined the team here. I wish I could lead a team of 10 top-tier engineers. It's not reality, and unfortunately as much as the AI and silicon valley CEO's would have you believe, while AI is an incredible tool, it’s not (and likely won’t be for the foreseeable future) there yet.

Working with what we've got: a hefty dose of passion, optimism, skill, ADHD hyper-focus and a self-punishing sense of duty, here's a brief run-down of what we've got planned for the app. No timelines, no over-promising, but tangible outcomes and WHY we're focusing on things in this order.

1 - Chats

Really? An aviation app and you want to make ANOTHER chat app? Yes. We ask for your trust. It's not just for instant messaging. It's a fully-integrated communication tool for aviation organisations, whose purpose is only now able to be fully realised since we built it two years ago. Not to say it hasn't been used! There have been thousands of messages about goodness knows what sent through our system.

Support Chat Integration

Shortly after writing this, the chat system will be fully integrated into our support system. You will see your support ticket conversations in the chat drawer, and when you click or tap on a thread, you will see the familiar support interface you're used to. You will see when we're typing back to you. You will get instant notifications when you've been replied to. You will be able to press "reply" on the notification on your phone and respond quickly at any time.

Disclaimer: Submissions of new tickets and feedback from the mobile app will come at a later date.

Events Chats Integration

I always dreamed of being able to message my student or students about an event in a purpose-built area for the event. I didn't want to have to search through Facebook Messenger, scrolling past dangerously distracting cat photos, my Mum asking me if an email from President Obama is legit, or be replied to with "who dis" from one of my 30 students who I'm flying cross country with in two hours. 🤦‍♂️

Already you can chat about a specific event in the web app! That chat will automatically include all people involved in that event. If you like, you can add additional recipients, like the course supervisor, or CFI.

There's a separate chats tab on the bottom navigation of the mobile app, where (when we release it) you will be presented with a Messenger-like list of chat threads. When you tap on a thread about an event, you'll be able to access those event details easily. When you tap on an event from the home screen or agenda, the resulting pop-up will have a chat icon where you can immediately enter the chat thread about that event. When you send a message, all recipients (people involved with that event) will be notified. You will be able to see when they've seen it, read it, and interacted with it. Unless you've set your Smart name to something clever and unique like "Maverick", you won't be replied to again with "who dis?". All with emoji support, naturally 💩☠️

Aircraft Chat Integration

When an aircraft is grounded on return by a student’s report of “engine skipped briefly when going round after a practiced forced landing”, you don’t want to scare them into never reporting anything again. But you may have the general checklist of standard questions like:

• Did you do the magneto checks?
• Did you do your engine clearing power checks?
• Did you have the carb-heat on? (for you analog lovers)
• Did you remember to fully richen the mixture?
• Did you have the fuel pump on?
• Did you try to slam the throttle through the firewall?

Etc etc. While the likely “yeah of course” response will still be given, at least you can reduce the time to receive it by a precious few flying hours. A chat thread scoped to the aircraft will be available, with the maintenance controller and anyone else, enabling quick follow up and progress reporting to all involved.

Safety Chat Integration

After Chats and flight-and-duty features are released, work will begin on mobile safety reporting. I'll write more about this below, but the chat system will provide a means of immediate communication scoped to the safety report you and others are involved in.

When creating a new safety report (unless anonymous) you'll create a new chat thread automatically including your safety manager. Here you can submit more photos, or clarify information. Your replies will go into the safety management system, into the binder of communication around the issue. In the future, when we expand the AI offerings (with your consent) this may go towards creating recommendations, summaries, and research about your safety system. Chats will be an integral part of a safety submission's communications. And since we're all super busy herding students and passengers into aircraft, this will significantly lower the barrier to having an effective safety system people can practically engage with.

2 - Flight and Duty

Missed clock-ins, clock-outs, incorrect duty reporting, unawareness of flight and duty times remaining, difficulty capturing breaks and rest periods on the fly, "I didn't see the roster change" issues... Enough about me - the mobile flight and duty system will provide pilots with an easy way to do the very least required of them - be aware of their flight and duty, record their flight and duty times and manage fatigue. It will notify and remind them of their current duty times, upcoming rostered on periods, and if they may have forgotten to clock out.

Before building this into the mobile system, we have to build the biggest update to the rostering system since its inception in the web application. That's going to take a while. Many months. Work on this has started, and we'll keep you updated on progress.

3 - Safety Reporting

Having been a safety manager for a brief, awful period at my job (I really didn't enjoy it), the single most difficult thing I found was getting people to ACTUALLY REPORT THINGS. The barrier to reporting was too damn high. If someone had forgotten to photocopy a new batch of "safety observation" sheets, and I was away, there could be a record-breaking no safety incident week! What you don't know doesn't hurt you right? Quite the opposite, actually.

It was more difficult than I ever anticipated to fill out critical fields on a form, such as "date", or "aircraft registration". The way report submitters seemed to disappear off the face of the Earth, I often thought the incident must have been quite serious considering how little I heard from them. Pilots seem to share some genetic traits with doctors, namely handwriting - myself included. Not even the latest and greatest AI could decipher the hieroglyphs I was presented with after a rough running engine caused by forgetting to lean the mixture at 10,000ft. Perhaps it was shakiness from adrenaline and/or mild hypoxia... Or the rough engine...

My dream is what I call "The big red button". It's a button you push when something happens. That's IT. No writing, no thought, no input, no nothing. JUST push a button, in the moment. It doesn't matter if you're online, offline, airborne, face down with a grazed knee after slipping on some swiss cheese in the foyer, the app will capture that you observed or encountered a safety hazard, at this time, on this date, at this location. If there’s one thing pilots are trained well for it’s pushing big red buttons when bad things happen.

The primary hurdle to safety reporting is solved - CAPTURING IT AS IT HAPPENS. This is the entry-point to that safety process you spent years and many dollars convincing the regulator everyone uses on the daily. This will notify the safety manager. This will notify you. This will remind you incessantly to complete the details after you've put a plaster on your knee. This will cause your safety manager to follow up - as they're judged solely on their ability to patch up the holes in the proverbial swiss-cheese - which is stopping people eating swiss cheese in the foyer in this case.

4 - Dispatching and Returning

Ever got in the aircraft, strapped yourself in, positively bursting with the anticipation of launching yourself thousands of feet in the air in a tin can only to turn to your sheepish-looking student wearing the familiar "I forgot to dispatch" face? Or perhaps if you as the instructor should have dispatched, a sudden call of nature needs answering and you speedily walk back to the lobby to dispatch?

That call of nature will have to wait with Smart Mobile. Because you'll be able to do it on your phone! As you're stuffing a quick lunch of extra-stinky supermarket tuna sushi in your face, you can check the status of the aircraft, licensing, medicals, maintenance, and even authorise/pre-dispatch the flight from the app with that free hand. Pilots are natural multi-taskers, after all.

5 - Lesson Records

I was an instructor with doctor-like handwriting. I also had a susceptibility for air sickness if I looked down for too long with a student who believed the rudder pedals were only for taxiing... I dreamed of having some easy way to capture at least grading information as it happens in the air, and not have my notes in whatever order the pen found the page - sometimes superimposed over the top of another note.

You'll be able to grade performance criteria, jot down simple notes per performance criteria or overall for the lesson, on your tablet or phone. If you're flying in the middle of nowhere with no reception, and your 1972 Cessna 150 doesn't have in-flight Wi-Fi just yet, no worries - it'll save everything offline, and when you return home and it connects to the internet, it'll upload everything to Smart where you can re-correct your auto-corrects and flesh out the details with targeted, helpful notes so your student can never read them.

Summing up

We’re proud of what we’ve achieved with the resources available to us. We know we don’t always hit the mark every time, and some decisions we have to make can be initially painful (2FA…) But we’ll never stop listening, never stop trying to improve. We’ll continue to strive for “industry leading” as our litmus test. At the end of the day, working for Smart and building this software (more like 3 or 4 pieces of software) is a job and what pays my rent. But...

Lucky for me, I work for a great boss who has the trust in his people to steer the development ship. Luckily, I work with great people who either code along-side me, or handle support and training and migration and testing and everything else under the sun that us hoity-toity “software engineers” don't have the time for (actually though... thanks Michaela, we love you).

Lucky for me, I've been programming since I was about 10 years old on my little toy computer that could run programs written in "BASIC" while watching the Saab 340's on final approach to NZNR through my bedroom window. Lucky for me, I code, build and stream my programming and maker projects in my spare time, because I love doing it. Lucky for me, I'm building software that’s for an industry that for 15 years, I was involved in and cared about deeply. After being around some very close to home accidents, an engine failure, and a selection of other mechanical and technical incidents, training and safety were way up high on my priorities. I helped and watched hundreds of my students gain jobs in airlines and live out their dreams, surpassing me to become more experienced and successful than I could dream.

As long as I'm working for Smart, I will tap into that time as a pilot, think about what I would have wanted, and work towards providing that. I'll try to leave the software and the industry in a better place than when I found it, from my little sphere of influence. One day I'll release those dream "I wish I had that" tools. Maybe then I’ll allow myself to go part time.

Thanks for reading and fly safe!

Stefan.