It’s always good to stay on top of the latest security developments and we have some important changes coming to increase security across the platform in 2026. 2025 has also been a big year, with a lot going on behind the scenes. Let’s dive in!

Security & Scams

As we all know, the internet is full of all kinds of traps designed to trick you into giving out sensitive personal information. A couple of things you can do to help keep yourself safe online is first, verify the domain name of the site you are accessing. Ours is smartaviation.net, you might also see a subdomain in front of the main domain, like myschool.smartaviation.net or app.smartaviation.net which is totally normal. You should also ensure that the address has https in the full address.

In the case of accessing Smart, all of the following would be red flags something is not right:

• http://www.smartflying.com/login
  Note this is http, not https, and the domain is incorrect.
• myschool.smartaviation.com
  The subdomain might look right, but the domain is incorrect.
• app.smartsystem.co.uk
  Again, the subdomain might look right, but the domain is incorrect.

The other thing we strongly recommend is to use a strong password, and rotate your passwords every 6-12 months, many password managers can help you with password rotation, otherwise setting a reminder on your phone will keep you on top of it. Remember to never share your passwords either, most security compromises, or “hacks” are usually some form of social engineering, and not “hacking” like hollywood may depict it.

You have probably noticed with some websites and apps you use, that they no longer use passwords, as the industry moves to “passwordless authentication”, typically they will use methods like single sign-on (SSO) or a one-time password (OTP) that gets emailed or sent as a text message before you can login. As such, we are also actively investigating and planning for passwordless with Smart in the future.

Mandatory MFA/2FA

Starting in early 2026, it will be mandatory to secure your Smart account with multi-factor authentication (MFA) also called two-factor authentication (2FA). This is currently an optional layer of security you can use, but in the interest of adopting best practice standards, we will be enforcing it for all Smart accounts in 2026.

You can set this up now, select “Account” from the sidebar, then scroll down until you see Two Factor Authentication, you can then “Enable” this for your account, using any authenticator app. Make sure you keep your recovery codes in a safe place should you ever need them.

Wrap Up

2025 has been a big year, our primary focus this year has been on increasing overall stability and performance of the platform. Many of these improvements have been with our infrastructure architecture, the servers, systems and databases that power Smart. We know some of these changes took some finessing to get right, and appreciate your patience and feedback while we implemented them. We are confident that we have them dialed in, and from all reports and the metrics we can see, things have never been more stable, and more performant with Smart - no more afternoon slow downs!

We believe in honesty and transparency, and we acknowledge that our roadmap is behind where we would like it to be. Our first focus is always on the existing functionality and stability over building new features, which admittedly has led to slip in what we were aiming to deliver for you this year. Having said that, we have still shipped some great new features, like the overhauled logbooks system, with nice print ready formats and observer logbooks for all our organisations in the aerial work space. For the full list of everything we have done in 2025, please check out the release notes for all the details.

The roadmap is still the same, our team are already busy building out a huge update to flight & duty, which will support all of CAO 48.1, including all appendixes, FRMS support, Part 137 operations, enhanced fatigue management obligations, at the same time building out our rostering tools to make building and managing shifts fast and simple. We have been engaging with several organisations on this already, who have been instrumental in providing us feedback and guidance to ensure this will meet the needs of the industry.

We thank you all for your continued support of Australian software in 2025, we love building tools for aviation down under, and look forward to delivering even more in 2026. Until next time!