This page describes user journeys conceptually. For hands-on task guidance, see the how-to guides
linked at the bottom: Create a Trip, Manage
Aircraft, and Conduct a FRAT.
The Director of Operations Experience
The DO’s relationship with PlaneConnection centers on the Command Center — a single-screen operational snapshot designed to answer the question “Is everything on track?” within minutes. The reason this dashboard exists is that DOs in Part 135 operations have historically cobbled together operational awareness from multiple disconnected systems: one for scheduling, another for maintenance, a third for financials. The Command Center consolidates six key performance indicators (active aircraft, today’s flights, crew on duty, on-time performance, fleet utilization, and open squawks) with trend deltas that immediately surface whether things are improving or degrading. Below the KPIs, an AI anomaly banner highlights statistical outliers — a sudden drop in OTP, an unusual concentration of delays at one airport — that might not be visible in the raw numbers. For periodic reporting, the DO turns to the Reports hub, which provides 40+ pre-built report types organized by category: utilization, financial, fuel, scheduling, and owner summaries. The reason PlaneConnection emphasizes exportable reports (PDF, Excel) is that DOs frequently need to present operational data to management boards, owners, and insurers who do not have platform access. Fleet change decisions — whether to add, remove, or reposition aircraft — represent some of the highest-stakes judgments a DO makes. These decisions draw on utilization trends, per-aircraft profit-and-loss data, maintenance forecasts from the due items system, and charter demand patterns. The platform brings all of this data together so the analysis does not require cross-referencing separate spreadsheets.The Chief Pilot Experience
The Chief Pilot’s daily workflow revolves around two questions: “Is every crew member flying today qualified and current?” and “Are there any elevated-risk flights that need my attention?” The Crew Roster and Currency Matrix answer the first question. The currency matrix presents a grid of crew members against certification items (medical, BFR, IPC, type rating, recurrent training), with color coding that makes status immediately visible — green for current, yellow for expiring within 60 days, red for expired. The reason this grid view exists, rather than individual crew detail pages, is that Chief Pilots typically need to scan across the entire pilot group at once, especially when making last-minute crew swaps. FRAT (Flight Risk Assessment Tool) oversight addresses the second question. When a pre-flight FRAT scores Medium or High, PlaneConnection alerts the Chief Pilot to review the risk factors, evaluate the PIC’s documented mitigations, and make an approval decision. This workflow embodies the SMS principle that elevated risks should receive proportional oversight — a concept rooted in 14 CFR Part 5’s Safety Risk Management requirements. Monthly SmartScore reviews add a longer-term dimension. SmartScore aggregates experience, proficiency, and risk factors into a composite score for each pilot. By sorting the crew roster by SmartScore, the Chief Pilot can identify pilots who may benefit from additional training and recognize those consistently demonstrating strong safety performance. Some operators prefer to use SmartScore as a discussion starter in crew meetings rather than a formal evaluation tool, because the score is most valuable when it prompts conversation about contributing factors.The Dispatcher Experience
Dispatchers have the most continuous interaction with PlaneConnection. While other personas check in periodically, dispatchers live on the Dispatch Board throughout the day. The board consolidates aircraft availability, the trip queue, weather conditions, and crew duty status into a single view because dispatchers need to hold all of these variables in mind simultaneously when making assignment decisions. The design rationale behind the Dispatch Board’s split layout — aircraft status grid on the left, trip queue on the right — comes from observing how experienced dispatchers work. They think in terms of asset availability first (“which aircraft is where and ready?”) and then match trips to available assets. Drag-and-drop assignment accelerates this matching, and the system automatically detects conflicts (maintenance windows, crew duty limits, scheduling overlaps) that might not be apparent from the calendar alone. Live flight monitoring through the In-Flight Display supports the dispatcher’s flight-following responsibilities under 14 CFR 135.77-99. When weather deteriorates at a destination, the platform presents alternate options with weather conditions, distance, fuel requirements, and FBO availability — information the dispatcher would otherwise need to assemble from multiple sources. Diversion coordination triggers automatic notifications to all affected parties (owner, passengers, next crew, maintenance), reducing the communication burden during time-critical situations. Trip scheduling with conflict resolution illustrates how the platform handles the combinatorial complexity of Part 135 operations. A new multi-leg trip must align aircraft availability, crew qualifications and duty limits, maintenance windows, and existing schedule commitments. The scheduling wizard surfaces conflicts explicitly and suggests resolutions, turning what was historically a manual spreadsheet exercise into an assisted decision process.The Line Pilot Experience
The line pilot interacts with PlaneConnection in concentrated bursts — before and after each flight — rather than continuously throughout the day. The My Cockpit personal dashboard is designed for these brief, focused interactions: upcoming trips, currency status, duty time remaining, and recent logbook entries, all visible without scrolling. The pre-flight workflow brings together information that pilots traditionally gathered from multiple sources: flight release from dispatch, weather from a separate briefing service, aircraft status from maintenance, and the FRAT assessment form. PlaneConnection consolidates these into a single flow because reducing context-switching on the ramp directly improves the quality of pre-flight preparation. Post-flight logging is intentionally designed for completion within 15 minutes of shutdown. The reason for this tight design target is that operational data quality degrades rapidly with delay — fuel burns remembered hours later are less accurate, and discrepancies not logged immediately may be forgotten entirely. The post-flight form captures flight times, fuel data, landings, approaches, time allocation, discrepancies, and expenses in a single session, with automatic updates to aircraft hours, the personal logbook, and duty time calculations. Currency management connects the pilot’s personal readiness to the Chief Pilot’s oversight. The currency strip on My Cockpit mirrors the same data visible in the Chief Pilot’s currency matrix, ensuring both parties see the same status. When a currency item enters the yellow (expiring) zone, the pilot can request a training slot directly, creating a loop between awareness and action that does not depend on someone remembering to check a spreadsheet.The Maintenance Controller Experience
The Maintenance Controller’s primary concern is fleet airworthiness — ensuring every aircraft is legal to fly and that upcoming maintenance is scheduled before it becomes overdue. The Due Items page presents a color-coded matrix (aircraft rows by inspection category columns) that makes the fleet’s maintenance posture visible at a glance. The four-tier color system (green for more than 60 days, yellow for 30-60 days, light red for less than 30 days, red for overdue) is deliberately more granular than a simple pass/fail because maintenance scheduling requires advance planning, not just deadline awareness. Discrepancy resolution follows a lifecycle from pilot report through assessment, deferral-or-repair decision, work order tracking, and closure. The reason PlaneConnection tracks this entire lifecycle, rather than just the initial report and final resolution, is that the intermediate decisions (MEL deferral periods, repair prioritization, parts procurement) are where airworthiness risk is managed in practice. Each step creates an audit trail that satisfies 14 CFR 135 Subpart J documentation requirements. AD/SB (Airworthiness Directive and Service Bulletin) compliance adds a regulatory dimension. When the FAA publishes a new AD, the Maintenance Controller must determine applicability across the fleet, schedule compliance actions, and document completion. The compliance matrix filters the due items view to AD/SB items specifically, showing fleet-wide status by directive number — a view that would require substantial manual effort to assemble from paper records.The Owner and Client Experience
Owners and charter clients interact with a deliberately simplified interface through the Owner Portal. The design philosophy is that aircraft owners want transparency and convenience without operational complexity. They want to know what their aircraft is doing, what it costs, and how to request a trip — not how to read a METAR or interpret a duty time calculation. Trip requests use plain language (airport names instead of ICAO codes, calendar pickers instead of UTC times) because owners should not need aviation expertise to communicate their travel needs. The request-to-estimate-to-approval workflow provides cost transparency — something that historically required phone calls and email exchanges — through a structured digital process. Monthly financial reviews bring together usage data, charter revenue, itemized expenses, and net position into a format that mirrors the owner statements produced by management companies. The reason this view is built into the platform, rather than delivered as an emailed PDF, is that owners increasingly expect real-time access to their aircraft economics, not month-end summaries.Cross-Role Data Flow
Perhaps the most important aspect of these journeys is how they connect. A trip does not belong to a single persona — it flows from the owner who requests it, through the dispatcher who schedules it, the Chief Pilot who verifies crew readiness, the Maintenance Controller who confirms airworthiness, the line pilot who flies and logs it, and back to the owner who reviews the invoice. PlaneConnection models this reality by making the trip a shared entity that each persona views and acts upon from their own perspective. Similarly, safety events flow across role boundaries. A discrepancy reported by a line pilot post-flight is assessed by the Maintenance Controller for airworthiness impact and may be elevated by a dispatcher or safety manager into the SMS pipeline for formal investigation. The operational data captured during these journeys — flight hours, duty periods, maintenance histories, FRAT scores — becomes the factual foundation for safety performance monitoring. An analogy helps illustrate the design: each persona’s view is like a different window into the same building. They see different aspects of the same operational reality, and the platform ensures that the data they see is consistent, current, and connected.Related
Operations Personas
Detailed persona definitions and responsibilities.
Create a Trip
Step-by-step guide to trip creation and management.
Conduct a FRAT
How to complete a Flight Risk Assessment.
Manage Aircraft
Fleet management tasks and procedures.