I have a very entrepreneurial and tech background with a strong focus on automation and since I started flying and getting more and more into aviation I noticed it is pretty much left behind in terms of innovation comparing to other areas.
I am looking for problems that I can solve through technology in the aviation field.
What do you find frustrating or don’t like doing when it comes to owning a plane / flying / building time or certifications?
I will put below a few that I found, please correct me if I am wrong, my views might be limited.
1. Finding planes to rent. I wish there was a platform that would centralize all the planes from schools, flying clubs, private owners in my area grouped by plane model. Now the only option is to ask around, do google searches. I found a company renting a very nice plane on Instagram. Couldn’t find them anywhere else.
2. Finding mechanics / maintenance companies for a specific plane. The only way is to search online and ask around.
3. Finding the landing fees at an airport. Even harder – finding handling fees. Paying online that fees would be a dream.
4. Finding insurance for a plane. I don’t own a plane yet but the friends that own tell me that they have to call a broker. When I do my insurances for the car I just put the data in a search engine and it gives me multiple options.
5. Finding a ferry pilot. I did not need one but a friend had to ask around and search companies in order to find one.
6. The scheduling software for flight schools / clubs / companies renting. One of the worst I have seen (and I’ve been around software for 17-18 years).
7. Finding a temporary or permanent hangar for your plane. Again, the only way is to ask around who has some space available for a night (when flying to a different airport) or to keep your plane.
Are those problems solved in any way that I don’t know about? Are they frustrating? Do you see more problems I couldn’t see?
I think the main reason for your gripes is that the lower end of GA (where most of us here operate) is extremely splintered into a myriad small operators.
ad 1) no big surprise here, as there are several different business models, all having different requirements. This goes from flight schools via clubs to syndicates, groups and individual owners with any number of combinations in between. Here in the US there was a company that tried to unify this space. IIRC they were using Cirrus aircraft and you had to fly one – very thorough, think checkride – checkout and were then good to rent anywhere in the US. I haven’t heard about them in years, AFAIK they folded. If it cannot be made to work in a rather homogenous system like the US, the I guess the chances of getting something like that going in Europe are pretty slim.
ad 2) you might try type-specific fora
ad 3) well, there are numerous threads here on EuroGA about just that…
ad 4) same here in the US. It is a small market of specialty insurance after all and not one size fits all
ad 5) depending on the complexity, this is usually handled by a local commercial pilot. I have occasionally flown airplanes for our mx organization. For more complex ops, there are specialist companies, an internet search will bring them up
ad 6) we use Schedulemaster in our club; they are tiny mom-and-pop outfit but very responsive to custom requests. Our system has several bespoke features and works great. No idea if they operate in Europe
ad 7) now that’s a universal issue !!
Laurent_N wrote:
The scheduling software for flight schools / clubs / companies renting. One of the worst I have seen (and I’ve been around software for 17-18 years).
myWebLog is very popular in Sweden and Norway and can also be used in English. It handles scheduling, logging and accounting. It has been around for a long time and is stable. From a flight school point of view it is missing features for keeping student records but it is extensible using an API.
Laurent, I agree with you completely, and have often wondered the same thing – why is there so little innovation in these areas?
The aviation market is small, and the part of the aviation market you are targeting is microscopic. There’s very little reward for the risk you are taking to develop something to address the needs of such a small market.
An opportunity you didn’t mention, which I believe will develop, are things like savvyaviation.com – analyzing engine and flight data. Another area which will be huge (IMHO) is an electronic co-pilot. Imagine a 360 degree camera, full access to all instruments, controls?, radio, intercom, connected over the internet (satellite) to a human on the ground who’s helping you. For some types of flying – single pilot IFR – this could be a big help. As they say, ideas are a dime a dozen.
If you want to make real money, find a way to sell something to 14 year old girls.
@172driver, @Airborne_Again, @eurogaguest198 thank you very much for your feedback!
@eurogaguest198 I don’t really want to get rich, I would like to solve some problems in an industry that I love (getting rich and flying don’t get along very well).
The GA industry is indeed small. I was also looking into business aviation ideas, I am working on an idea there.
Yes, I agree, ideas are worthless, the implementation is the most important part, but I have made a mistake in the past – building great products to solve a problem that nobody had or it was not worth solving which I am trying to avoid now. That’s why I am looking for burning problems, frustrations I could address even in a small market.
An opportunity you didn’t mention, which I believe will develop, are things like savvyaviation.com – analyzing engine and flight data.
Another area which will be huge (IMHO) is an electronic co-pilot.
https://aerosys.io/goose-for-pilots
Finding the landing fees at an airport. Even harder – finding handling fees. Paying online that fees would be a dream.
Most public airports and airfields have their fees published on the website in a pdf doc. Very cumbersome to extract the applicable amounts. An app that scrapes these and parses the data would be nice.
For insurance there is https://planesurance.app
For scheduling there are lots of options:
Check out my friend’s product apron-pilot.com
Also
club.eavio.aero
private-radar.com
https://www.vereinsflieger.de
https://www.skyman.lu
https://www.flightcircle.com
https://myfbo.com/myfbo/ default.asp
https://www.flightschedulepro.com
https://www.talon-systems.com
https://www.skymanager.com/ features/
https://www.aircraftclubs.com/ features.php
https://www.apron-pilot.com/de/
https://www.rentingforce.com/en/ software/aircraft-rental.html
https://www.flylog.io/general- aviation/
www.charterware.de
Laurent_N wrote:
The GA industry is indeed small. I was also looking into business aviation ideas, I am working on an idea there.
Empty/Positioning legs of private jets are waiting to be disrupted. As inefficient as it is difficult to solve I guess.
Snoopy wrote:
Empty/Positioning legs of private jets are waiting to be disrupted. As inefficient as it is difficult to solve I guess.
You read my mind. This is exactly what I am working on at the moment but I thought I should mention here only things related to GA.
Various attempts have been made at bits of this.
For example there is that Aerops outfit which is trying to get airports to sign up to its landing fee payment system; obviously they take a cut so if the payment staff at the airport is needed anyway to do other jobs (which will be the case at any properly organised place e.g. at EGKA the fire crew do that job, since there are never any fires) the airport correctly sees no point in paying it. So the takeup is tiny and mainly confined to Germany where this outfit lives. They hilariously got the contract for the Aero EDNY slot booking which they totally screwed up, twice… causing huge problems for anybody going to the Aero, but I am sure they will get the contract for 2024 also 
They are basically incompetent in IT but do lots of marketing.
Renting has always been hard. Most of the hardware is junk, with a few expensive exceptions e.g. the SR22 group mentioned here which attracted a small number of customers who wanted a nice plane but with the usual zero commitment of the rental model. You had to buy an hours entitlement though.
There are enough ferry pilots but few like the job much because most of the work is moving junk which can get quite interesting on the N Atlantic route. Consequently most prefer turboprop and jet work.
Schools tend to be badly organised, plus they often do ad-hoc changes e.g. a group of people walks in for a pleasure flight for somebody’s birthday so a student gets bumped off his training flight.
Various people have tried databases showing landing and other fees, but this requires airports to sign up to a database and update it. This idea has worked a bit according to national loyalties, so you get region-specific takeups. And only a % of GA chooses destinations on the basis of fuel price and landing fees – except cases like €500. Also much of GA does only short local flights, to places they know well.
I guess you are looking to develop some product, but it will be hard. “Europe” doesn’t exist in any normal marketing sense. It is a collection of countries that share borders and little else, and if they share more they tend to have little GA activity. The main markets – France Germany UK – share practically nothing in terms of language, culture, marketing methods, and the first two have strong loyalties to their own people making it very hard for a foreign newcomer to get established. I’ve been in export since 1978. It can be done if you have a good product which has no competition and which requires no buy-in from anybody on the ground but there already are bits of software in all these areas.
As Snoopy above shows, lots of people have tried lots of things.
The jet world is something else but also lots of people know this and there are various services. Rocketroute for example is mostly TPs and jets. Jeppesen and others do flight support services. A friend was jet flying in Germany and there are/were loads of companies there in that sector.
Snoopy wrote:
Empty/Positioning legs of private jets are waiting to be disrupted. As inefficient as it is difficult to solve I guess.
Wingly had a go at this with “Wingly Jet” – I don’t find much about it anymore, so not sure if they abandoned it?
