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David Leiting
04-30-2020, 03:03 PM
As a member of a few different flying clubs in my time, I am curious to know how other clubs handle their aircraft scheduling.
1. What system do you use to schedule?
2. What scheduling rules do you have place? i.e. Maximum reservations times, etc.

Thanks!

Mike Switzer
05-07-2020, 03:16 PM
The club I used to belong to used http://www.aircraftclubs.com/
It worked fairly well. If I remember correctly we were limited to 4 reservations total at a time, we had 4 - 6 planes available depending on what year it was. The more popular planes for trips & vacations you needed to reserve well in advance if you wanted them for multiple days at a time.

Ken Mercer
05-07-2020, 03:59 PM
As a member of a few different flying clubs in my time, I am curious to know how other clubs handle their aircraft scheduling.
1. What system do you use to schedule?
2. What scheduling rules do you have place? i.e. Maximum reservations times, etc.

Thanks!

We're using FlightCircle, a cloud-based application that costs us $10/month (as EAA members). It was designed for FBOs so it has a lot of features we don't use, but the online scheduling works well for us. Scheduling, billing, maintenance and currency tracking all work well, and after an initially-steep learning curve it's easy to configure and use. I've talked with one of the principals at FlightCircle a couple of times about a particular issue that didn't make sense and and he update the program within a couple of days. Not saying they can do this in all cases, but they have been responsive to us, and knowledgeable about aviation operation. We're still waiting on a mobile app, though.

More information at https://www.eaa.org/eaa/pilots/flying-club/benefits-and-discounts/flight-circle

k

ahramin
05-07-2020, 05:04 PM
I'm a member of a small club with one aircraft. We use goboko.com for scheduling, document control, and maintenance schedule tracking. It's under $10 a month and works ok.

We have no scheduling rules but will add some as needed.

robert l
05-16-2020, 09:54 AM
I rent from two different places, one uses FlightCircle and the other uses, HoldShort. These are not flying clubs, just rental, and there doesn't seem to be any conflict with scheduling. I'm retired so I can fly during the week when most people are working so it's not a problem for me either way. I would like to get a flying club started but it's hard getting enough intrest in my area.
Bob

dusterpilot
06-01-2020, 03:21 PM
We use bookourplane (https://bookourplane.com/) .com. It's free and is quite capable. As administrator, I can manage our aircraft, our members, control the schedule, and maintain files of .pdf documents. I can also post messages to all our members.
Only 1reservation that includes a holiday is permitted at any given time. Only 2 that include a Saturday or Sunday, & only 3 that include a weekday. Multi-day trips are normally subject to a two-hour per day minimum.

Tracker
06-16-2020, 02:29 PM
We used Google for scheduling as it was easy to use and free. No other features available such as maintenance. We only had one plane so it wasn't difficult.

jerryb829
07-07-2020, 09:00 PM
Our club uses a service called ScheduleMaster and have used it since the '95. It costs our club $40.00 per month for 4 planes. We have 4 aircraft on this service with 70 pilots in our club and about 15 CFI's. This service has many features: membership list, able to limit members to aircraft based on checkouts, ability to send out bulk emails to the membership, block schedules due to maintenance, billing, scheduling limits, lock a pilot out if their medical or biannual expires. The only limitation is that this service is only available by logging into the Schedulemaster website, there is not an app available for this service. We limit our members to 3 reservations. Long trip reservations are limited to 12 days and only may include 1 weekend. When reserving airplanes for a multiday trips the pilot must fly a minimum of 1 hour a day Monday through Friday and 2 hours on Saturday and Sunday. Day trips have a minimum of 1 hour flight time per 6 hour reservation. You can customize the scheduling to fit your club's requirements.

Samuel
01-31-2022, 09:11 PM
Our club (Bemidji Flying Club (https://www.facebook.com/BemidjiFlyingClub/)) uses bookourplane.com (https://bookourplane.com/). Its free and works pretty well. Also we have emailed the creator, Lars, with questions and he is always pretty prompt. Now that we are running a two airplane fleet we would like to incorporate the maintenance tracking side of things. So we will probably be looking for a new software.