In article ,
Greg Esres wrote:

Our flight school is currently trying to move to an online, internet
based scheduling system, using a service provided by "MyFBO".

The idea is to schedule via the internet (even when standing at the
counter at the flight school) for all flights that occur after the
current day. Every morning, the staff will print out a schedule for
the day and any changes for that day must be done to the paper
schedule.

The consensus of the flight instructors and staff is that the
interface is extremely difficult to use, and slow. There will be only
one computer available for all users to make changes to the schedule
and the internet connection is a bit flakey. While frequent users
will probably be able to learn the system, it seems unlikely that
students/renters will develop any kind of proficiency with the system.
As far as I can tell, there are no contingency plans about what to do
when the system goes down.

Does anyone have an experience with online scheduling with large
flight schools? How well did it work?

We (Alameda Aero Club -- alameda-aero.com) use www.aircraftclubs.com
for all scheduling (150 members, 6 aircraft). It's not perfect, and
it's not the cheapest such service, but it's hard to believe we could
do without it any more. We don't have a paper system at all now except
for after-flight billing and squawks -- and we've never had more than
very minor problems in getting the club members to use it or learn it,
and it lets people schedule (etc.) from work, home, wherever. I think
it's been very reliable and successful -- much better than the old
system we used on the club's PC -- and it almost immediately increased
aircraft usage and renatl income. But there are other similar services
out there that may be better and / or cheaper.


Hamish (remove the xyz's...)