Join us for a chat with a pioneer in the general aviation world! This week we talk to the creator and CEO of Flight Schedule Pro and LogTen, Nick Wegner.
Please subscribe to our podcast, and share this week's episode! It really helps grow the show.
Also be sure to follow us on social media:
Facebook - Behind the Prop - Home | Facebook
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/behindtheprop/
and of course check us out any time at BehindTheProp.com!
00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop 773 Cherokee number two following Flint traffic three mile final one trolley bravo makesford in Runway two five going four mile.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:24
Bobby Doss
What's up, Wally?
00:26
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:27
Bobby Doss
I am fantastic as always. This week we have a guest on the show, a partner of mine at the highest of levels in the organization, we have Nick Wagner from Flight Schedule Pro. Welcome to the show, Nick.
00:41
Nick Wagner
Thanks, Bobby. Excited to be here.
00:43
Bobby Doss
So I believe this is Nick's first podcast ever. We've done a little bit of prep, we've done a little bit of storytelling to prepare for this. But if you don't know Flight Schedule Pro and Log10 for that matter are both two big companies that Nick is the CEO and co founder of. Flight Schedule Pro literally runs my business at the flight school that I work at. You, if you're a flight training student, probably have used Flight Schedule Pro. Whether it's white label or not, you don't know you're using it behind the scenes. Flight Schedule Pro has some big numbers. Nick will talk about those statistics. But Nick, all of us train and fly and we know we need to book planes. There's gotta be a good story about how you came up with Flight Schedule Pro and we're the co founder.
01:28
Bobby Doss
So walk us through a little bit of your history as a pilot and how on earth did you build Flight Schedule Pro?
01:34
Nick Wagner
Yeah, no, this is, it's a fun topic, right? And you know, honestly, it's, you know, like many stories, it's, you know, me being selfish, trying to solve one of my own problems. Right. That's how it all came to be. But really the short story is my co founder and business partner, Jason Barnes, went to school together at the University of Kansas, and were both very entrepreneurial. And back in those days, around, you know, 1999, 2000, were at college together again and were developing websites for local companies there in the area. So we had to convince them that it'd be a good idea to be on the Internet back in those days. So it's different times today, but that's how we got started. And the websites were building, Jason would design them and then I would do the very simple programming.
02:31
Nick Wagner
Right.
02:32
Nick Wagner
I was not a trained developer engineer, so we kind of learned all this on the fly. Took some intro classes while were at School. But we really got to a point where, you know, weren't sales, professional salesmen, so we didn't like chasing the next job.
02:49
Nick Wagner
Right.
02:49
Nick Wagner
And we kind of got the idea that, well, it'd be cool if we could run a subscription company, right. And charge subscript. And just so happens at the same time, I had a passion for aviation, right. And I was getting my private pilot certificate. And so the airport was just far enough away from our school where we lived that I had to call long distance on my cell phone. This is one of those, you know, the first cell phones where you had to pay by the minute.
03:19
Bobby Doss
Most of our listeners won't believe you and they can't imagine that their iPhone just wouldn't call three blocks away. But yes, I remember those days where you had to make a decision if you were going to make that phone call or not. One, did you want to spend your minutes and then two, did you want to pay the long distance fees on top of your minutes that you were going to have to give away?
03:37
Nick Wagner
Yeah. Then if you remember, they did it like at certain times it would cost more to call, you know, so I remember telling my friends, hey, call me after 8pm Right? It's free. And you know, so we'd have to wait, you know, before we talk with each other. But anyway, just far enough towards in a different area code and you'd have to call long distance there. Being a broke college student, you know, we kind of put two and two together and you know, after being on hold for so long, you know, being charged for those minutes, you know, waiting for an instructor to get their shot at the schedule, you know, back in those days, most of schedules are kept on these big books, right?
04:16
Nick Wagner
And there'd be a pile of eraser, you know, on the floor there or people racing on the books and putting new names in there. And so we just kind of came to the idea. It's like, be great if we could just see the schedule online. Right? That's really where the idea came from. It wasn't to help a flight school, you know, or help your operations. It was literally trying to solve my problem of not wanting to spend money on long distance calls on my phone. Right, sure. We quickly realized that the student pilots really weren't able to decide which, you know, schedule that the flight schools are going to use. So we had to turn our attention to the flight schools pretty quick. And that's really how it came to be.
05:03
Bobby Doss
Do you remember? I'm sure you do. What, what the date was when you first had the first school sign up.
05:08
Nick Wagner
It was, it was 2000. And, you know, we're located in the Kansas City area. And this is funny. Actually. The first time we tried to sell Flight Schedule Pro, there was a airport. It ironically wasn't at the one that I flew at, but it was a different flight schools. It was right next to the college. And one of the professors knew what were doing and got us a meeting with the flight school owner. I can't remember who it was now, but we literally dressed up in suits, you know, and we got our computers and went over there and this is going to be a big deal. I mean, it's hilarious. Think, you know, walking into a, you know, a flight school dressed up in suits. I think I even have like the banker's vest on and everything. Like, this is a big deal.
05:58
Nick Wagner
We walked over there and we got a meeting in the first, within the first, like 10 minutes of the meeting, flight school owners held up his pencil and he said, I can just use this. It's working fine. I don't need anything else, you know, so we're like, oh, wow, this isn't good. You know, shot down, you know, and so really. So that happened there at Lawrence, Kansas. But then we got our first customer in California. It's called Turner Aviation. And it was a husband and wife, that one aircraft, and they shared it with a few other people. So that was our first customer. You know, they mailed us a check in the mail. So it's a big deal. I think it was something for like $9, you know, but that was our big win, you know.
06:46
Bobby Doss
Yep.
06:48
Nick Wagner
One of the things that we didn't realize that kind of slowed growth in the beginning was, you know, back in those days, you know, airports are, you know, most of the general aviation airports are a little bit outside of the, you know, metropolitan centers. And so they were kind of the last ones to get Internet, you know, and our whole business run ran on the Internet. So we happened to get that first customer out in California because they were a little bit more cutting edge.
07:14
Nick Wagner
Right.
07:14
Nick Wagner
And started to get the Internet before everybody else.
07:17
Bobby Doss
Well, and people don't have. I mean, very few of the people that are trying to get their pilot certificate today have any concept of the expense to buy $9 worth. Flight Schedule Pro would have been probably Microsoft Small Business Server, and they would have had to have email that they were managing. None of this cloud stuff. Existed and the amount of complexity for a husband and a wife to then have and build their own IT department to host a website to put your code on top of it. Now we just sign up and we use your servers or whoever servers you're hosting your stuff on. It's a completely different world. But the decisions to go from pencil to your software were monumental in 2000 for sure.
08:02
Bobby Doss
The amount of work and effort and most don't remember There was a Y2K problem and man, it was probably very difficult to convince people to go all in with flight Schedule Pro.
08:13
Wally Mulhern
Well, even back then, smartphones weren't a thing. So, so it's not like you had your schedule in your back pocket, you know.
08:21
Nick Wagner
You know.
08:22
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, I, I mean when did, when did smartphones become a thing?
08:27
Bobby Doss
I, I don't even know, like 2008, 2009.
08:30
Wally Mulhern
Okay. All right.
08:32
Nick Wagner
So I mean it was all done on desktop, you know. Yeah, when I say desktop, I mean the big ones. Right. You know.
08:38
Bobby Doss
Right. Yeah.
08:40
Nick Wagner
So, yeah, we definitely had challenges over the years. You know, we had Y2K and you know, 911 happened, financial crash crisis and the dot com crash. All those fun things happen there, you know, and so we just, you know, we're persistent. I mean that's really the, you know, people ask us like, hey, how did you do it? You know, you're, you know, a lot of people think we're an overnight except success.
09:06
Bobby Doss
Right, thanks. Yeah.
09:08
Nick Wagner
Yeah. It took 25 years to become an overnight success. Right. But it's just grit, you know, hanging in there and it really, you know, I think Steve Jobs said you got to really be passionate about what you do, especially as an entrepreneur.
09:21
Nick Wagner
Right.
09:22
Nick Wagner
Because you're going to hit all those challenges and you got to have something to help drive you through those. And, and really that I think that's how we made. At the end of the day, we've just been passionate about aviation, you know, and all the people that make it happen. And so that help us get us through, you know, all the tough times and get us to where we're at today. You know, it's still very challenging, but they're different challenges now for sure.
09:46
Bobby Doss
And I asked you to look up when we became a customer because I knew were a customer of your business before I owned the flight school and you told me it was 2014, so we've been a 10 year customer. Bob obviously made the decision before I was around. I remember as a Flight school student I started training here in 2015. Flight Schedule Pro was all that I knew from a standpoint of how I booked my time and scheduled with the flight school. So I never as not ever flying before that. I never knew anything different than Flight Schedule Pro. And it's always kind of been easy, but that's been 10 years of hard work as well. Right. And where you've come from and where you've helped build that tool.
10:27
Bobby Doss
Now I understand you've got some outside money and investments and you're trying to go a little faster and quicker than maybe you could have done it at your own pace. To describe what the introduction of the acquisition of log 10 and what the vision is and kind of what the up and coming things are that maybe you want to share about. What's the future of Fly Schedule Pro?
10:47
Nick Wagner
Yeah, I know. Happy to do it. So really, you know, when we started and grew the business, we ran it very conservatively, right? We, we grew and it was steady and, you know, we really had the mindset and Jason was very good with our finances throughout all the years, and he made sure that, you know, we could take some risks, but if they didn't pan out, that we still be able to keep going right, and do it. So we didn't want to do anything too big to where if we failed, that we couldn't keep serving the customers and growing. So really weren't, you know, we didn't want to take on a lot of risk throughout the first, you know, 10, 15 years of flight Schedule Pro.
11:27
Nick Wagner
And so we just had steady growth there and we reinvested a lot of the revenue that we had back into the product and that's how we kept driving it forward, really. We got to this inflection point a few years back and we're doing the calculus and we really thought to ourselves, is it given the pilot shortage and the new challenges all of our customers are facing and in the growth that the industry is experiencing, is it riskier to kind of do it how were doing it before, or should we go take on some investment so that we can accelerate our product development and really go be able to solve some of these bigger challenges in better ways, is that riskier?
12:16
Nick Wagner
And so when we did the math, we really both came to the conclusion that it would be smarter for us and the business if were to take on investment so that we can move faster and really be able to solve the challenges that you're facing today. Bobby, at your Flight school and a lot of the other ones with this unprecedented demand. Right. For flight training. So that's really how we came to the decision to take on investment and part of the advantage of that is were able to acquire a company called Cordyne Aviation. And they are they're, they're the company that created Log 10 logbook. So that product on its own has over 100,000 users and it's absolutely amazing.
12:59
Nick Wagner
It's really popular within the professional circles and it really helps pilots keep track of their logbooks and you know, as they go and get the interviews and need to report out of it does a really good job there. So one of the things you'll see, Bobby, and things were really trying to focus on here is how do we make the experience better for the pilots, the student pilots.
13:21
Nick Wagner
Right.
13:22
Nick Wagner
How do we help them? Which ends up helping you and the flight school operator. So it's pretty exciting. We've been able to do things weren't able to do before because of this investment in part that we entered into.
13:36
Bobby Doss
Awesome. Yeah, we've seen that and we've seen the massive growth of log 10. I think we've lost three instructors. I say lost because we wanted to keep them, but they're going to go to the airlines and I think all three of them have gone to SkyWest and SkyWest's cadet program and they have to present their logbooks in a log 10 format to SkyWest. I'm sure they're doing something to check all that data, but definitely very popular logbook and does give you a unique perspective that start touching that student instead of just the operator of a flight school. So. Makes perfect sense.
14:12
Nick Wagner
Yeah, we did, we, I think we just announced this not too long ago, but Log 10 is partnered with SkyWest Pilot Pathway Program. So we're able to take some of the reporting work away from the students and from SkyWest.
14:28
Nick Wagner
Right.
14:28
Nick Wagner
And so as the hours go in the student's logbook that can autom be reported out to SkyWest so they can monitor where all their cadets are and that way the student doesn't have to do it. SkyWest doesn't have to request it.
14:41
Nick Wagner
Right.
14:41
Nick Wagner
And it's just automated and it's real time. You know, that's the interesting thing with the logbook. As soon as you give somebody a report, it's most likely outdated. You know, two days later it's not current. So we're helping solve some of those challenges which I think really benefits the students.
14:57
Bobby Doss
Well, on rainy days around here, I also see a lot of CFIs sitting in front of a, either a screen or in front of a logbook, catching up. And I always ask him, how far behind are you? Because it's kind of like expenses for me as a business person, I hate those more than anything else. And, you know, logbooks fall behind. And I've had, I think it was actually Wally's daughter one time that was well past 35 days. And I'm like, golly, that's gonna take forever. Just pound it out. Don't let, I always tell new flight instructors on here, don't let it get past three days because it'll be such a mountain to climb that you're not going to ever want to go sit down and fix your logbook. So the digital ways to go. The way to go, for sure.
15:37
Nick Wagner
Yeah. Speaking about log 10 real quick. And then we can go circle back. But one of the amazing thing that's going to be coming out here pretty quick is we're integrating Flight schedule pro with log 10 so that all the flights that are done and logged in Flight Schedule Pro as part of the training activity will be automatically logged for the flight instructor and the student. So hopefully you won't get behind. Right. That's our goal, is to take all that work away from everybody.
16:10
Wally Mulhern
That's nice. That's awesome.
16:12
Nick Wagner
Yeah.
16:13
Bobby Doss
So what else is the future? I mean, I'm kind of in the know, being on your customer board and privy to some stuff. But what is it that you want to share about what's coming in the short term with Flight Schedule Pro from a flight school student perspective?
16:27
Nick Wagner
Yeah, absolutely. So here in the next month, we're going to have some pretty big releases going out there that we're super excited about. We're really focused on helping the flight schools, you know, automate their operations.
16:43
Nick Wagner
Right.
16:43
Nick Wagner
And just take a lot of the work away, manual work that you all are having to do. So, you know, we'll be launching some features that automate billing and payment and invoice creation.
16:56
Nick Wagner
Right.
16:56
Nick Wagner
And cut down on the workloads there. We're also launching huge updates in the scheduling world. And so really our goal at the end of the day here is to automate all your scheduling. And so what we're hearing over and over again is, you know, some of our flight schools train 200, 300, 400 students. And when you look at a schedule, any given day, like how do you know if that schedule is good or not?
17:26
Nick Wagner
Right?
17:27
Nick Wagner
And it took a lot of time to create that schedule. And so it's almost impossible for a human to do that.
17:34
Nick Wagner
Right?
17:34
Nick Wagner
Are all the right students scheduled? You know, who's ahead, who's behind? You know, are we meeting, are we going to meet our expected graduation dates or those requirements? And so what we're going to be deploying is we're taking in all these different variables, right? What course is the student in, how long, you know, what lesson are they at? Are they ahead, are they behind? What lesson do they need to fly next?
17:57
Nick Wagner
Right.
17:58
Nick Wagner
What are the weather requirements? What are the day night requirements? What's the student's availability? What's the instructor's availability? What's the aircraft's maintenance status? So we're taking all this data and we're feeding it into these algorithms and basically allowing you as a flight school operator to build and prioritize your schedule in an automated fashion with this new technology. So, for instance, if you look at the weather, you say, oh, you know, the clouds are going to be low, right? Let's try to, let's prioritize instrument students or commercial students or whatever that day so we can keep the planes flying. Then you can literally do a couple clicks, push a button, and it will go schedule, you know, hundreds of reservations on your schedule for you, taking all that work out.
18:46
Nick Wagner
And so our goal, you know, for this first iteration is really be able to create 80% of the schedule for you and then allow you to prioritize kind of the last 10 or 20%. Because some of our customers, you know, they're, they've got three or four people just consistently sitting there building their schedules, right? And we should be able to cut down on the amount of work it takes, but also be able to do it really intelligently so that the right people are scheduled in the right aircraft, you know, with the right priority.
19:18
Nick Wagner
And the whole goal, this, right, is to make sure that you're advancing your students as efficiently as possible, which is a win for you, but it's also a win for the students, you know, at the end of the day, and then hopefully take a bunch of that mundane work away so you can focus on what you all do best, and that's train the students, right, and give them a superior education. So those are the features that we're going to be releasing. And you know, I think were talking earlier a couple days ago, and there are some AI components to it. But I don't think we're ready to call it 100% AI. There's definitely some very sophisticated mathematics and algorithms that power it. But yeah, we do have some AI things coming down the road, but they're not quite ready yet. Yeah.
20:06
Bobby Doss
And I think from a listener's perspective, the students that are training at schools that use Flight Schedule Pro or maybe something else that needs to migrate to Flight Schedule Pro, they don't understand one, I don't think they understand that we've made an investment as a small business to be all in on Flight Schedule Pro, which does benefit the flight school, but they don't know how much it's benefiting the student and that expense has got to be spread out somewhere. So that's in the rate, but they don't understand how much, how far we've come. Right. So a little history lesson on where UFS has been and where we're going to be. The, the scheduling components always been Flight schedule pro since 2014. When I bought the flight school. Bob had built something that he thought was the greatest thing ever. And it really was great.
20:52
Bobby Doss
But it was in a program called FileMaker Pro that similar to Microsoft Access and it kind of ran the billing aspects of what Bob did. And so he didn't have the billing component. I don't know that the billing modules or the hubs were really what they were when Bob built that program. But he had, all his maintenance was done in this FileMaker Pro application and his billing was done in this FileMaker Pro application. And Bob didn't have a twin engine aircraft. So when he wrote all that, he wrote it with one engine in mind. And then I bought a twin engine aircraft. And my history is a little tech. And so I started getting into the code of this FileMaker Pro thing and the level of effort to add a second engine to invoicing and a second tachometer and all that.
21:35
Bobby Doss
I was like, there's no way I'm going to be a software developer. I just got out of the software business and that's when we chose to go all in with Flight Schedule Pro. And I think our big switchover was January 1, 2020, where we retired the FileMaker Pro application and went all in and bought all the hubs and did everything we could do. And we've really, I think, grown together from that standpoint. Now everything's done in Flight Schedule Pro from a standpoint of the student management, the training management, the billing management, students can see transactions, they can put money on their account. Now you guys have advanced and gone and included E checks. From a direct from a bank perspective, we have the ability from a business standpoint, the transactions are fairly economical.
22:20
Bobby Doss
Although I don't think anyone knows how expensive credit cards are until they are at an executive level in a small business. But all maintenance is done. Our work order systems in our, in our Flight Schedule Pro application, we just made another six year commitment to Flight Schedule Pro in the last four months and have bought into the suite mindset. Which means, I think that means from your perspective and my perspective, we get everything that's included unless they're add on licenses of sort. But the system really does run. Our company integrates with QuickBooks and I keep knocking on your team's door to add features that I want added. But we'll take that offline. Nick and I'll try and twist your arm to put some of my feature requests a little higher up in the bucket.
23:08
Bobby Doss
But at the end of the day, the student pilot doesn't understand the level of effort that goes into creating and even using your software. Right. So just the rule of whether or not the student can manage something, the flexibility that you've created for reporting, and then my control of letting some people see those reports and others not see those reports. I think if the student pilot could really see under the covers of how much more benefit they're getting from a school that does use Flight Schedule Pro versus someone who might use something as rudimentary as a book or Google Calendar, there's no comparison. And that little bit of an expense even passed through the student is so valuable to the outcome of their progress. And one thing you didn't talk about but it's progress profiles and training.
23:55
Bobby Doss
You allude to it and how the scheduling will drive it. But the introduction of progress profiles probably two years ago was something that took configuration from the flight school side, but now is the foundation of where you're going to build the schedule. And if a student has a goal, summertime is always weird for me because this student, we'll call him Jane, comes in and says hey, I got to go to college August 15th and I need to get done.
24:21
Bobby Doss
Well then would have been nice to know that like six months ago, but okay, how do we build a plan and your new scheduling automation almost AI is going to be able to build a plan for her to be successful with some risk built in for weather and maintenance and all that other stuff to where we can kind of tell her whether she's gonna make it or not. Make It. And that's really powerful from a flight school perspective and a student, because we've made the decision with parents and a student already this summer to just stop training. It doesn't make sense. And while that does cost me some revenue, it's the right thing for the student and it's gonna make them a raving fan of what we're doing. And she'll come back one day. It won't. It won't be the end of her time.
25:05
Bobby Doss
It's just the end of her time this summer with United Flight Systems. So I think. I think the tools are really powerful. And I don't think the student ever really realizes just how powerful the fact that the 50 hours are being counted for them or the 100 hours is being counted for me or they can squawk something and everyone in the business sees it. Right. It's a. It's a really good tool and is tailored just for my business and hopefully for the students experience. For sure.
25:31
Nick Wagner
Yeah. No, first of all, thank you, Bobby, for being a customer for. For that long. You know, the only way we, you know, we become better is if we get to have conversations with people like you. You know, we're not in the business of sitting in our black box and dreaming up things. Right. And then hoping they solve the problems. Like we have to have the conversations with you and the others like you so that we can help. Help really solve these and make sure we're investing in the right areas. I mean, you're right on. Some of the big advances you'll be seeing here, and I didn't talk. Thanks for reminding me. Is in the student tracking piece.
26:08
Nick Wagner
Right.
26:08
Nick Wagner
The accelerated training tracking that. That we're going to be introducing. And so one of the common pieces of feedback we get is where is everybody, you know, and who's. Who's on track and who's off track? And what's really complicated about the answer to that? It's, well, who are you talking about?
26:28
Nick Wagner
Right?
26:29
Nick Wagner
And you've got some students to your point that, you know, maybe they can only fly during the summer or they can only commit to a couple times, you know, to fly a couple times a week.
26:39
Nick Wagner
Right.
26:40
Nick Wagner
Well, their expected graduation date's going to be quite a bit further out, you know, than somebody who can come in and go, you know, fly every day or two times a day. And so this new technology that we're releasing will allow you to do that.
26:54
Nick Wagner
Right.
26:54
Nick Wagner
It's basically define different groups and cohorts of students, set different expectations for those students and again, when you go to schedule them, maybe you need to prioritize those students differently or those different cohorts, you know, at different times. And so our technology is going to be, is going to allow you to do that. So we're really excited about that, not only for what it'll do for you, but also the student.
27:17
Nick Wagner
Right.
27:18
Bobby Doss
What about the student that's falling behind? What is the technology going to do to help them get back on track and get to where they have a goal to graduate by X date? How are they going to. How stupid the system going to help them with that?
27:28
Nick Wagner
Yeah, so really, system is going to tell them where they're at. So that's the great thing about it is getting this information not only in front of you, Bobby, but the students, so that when they do start to fall behind, we're showing them that. And not only showing them that, but potentially helping them get back on track.
27:45
Nick Wagner
Right.
27:46
Nick Wagner
So if they're not flying enough, tell them, hey, you're going to need to fly this many more hours or you're going to need to accomplish this lesson or whatever it is.
27:55
Nick Wagner
Right.
27:56
Nick Wagner
You know, we're not in the business of teaching, but we can definitely help facilitate, you know, when lessons should be scheduled or where people are at any given time. So that's really the goal. You know, again, I think helping the students really helps you at the end of the day. So that's our goal. With our, you know, accelerated training and programs tracking that, we're going to be releasing here, big updates to those. And I think kind of going back to what you were saying before, how you use all the different modules of Flight Schedule Pro. Because of that, it allows us to do some unique things.
28:31
Nick Wagner
Right.
28:32
Nick Wagner
We have data on the maintenance status of the aircraft. We have data on all the students and where they're at. We have data on all the different financial pieces of your business. And we can use all that to help drive schedule and prioritize your different schedules every day to do that so that it benefits the students and ultimately your school. And we can only do that because we have the data in one system.
29:01
Nick Wagner
Right.
29:02
Nick Wagner
To give us that complete picture. So that's, we're really excited about that.
29:06
Bobby Doss
Yeah, it was a very painful thing when students were scheduled and then the billing was done in a different system before. So it's been nice that they're all together. One of the, again, these are the things that probably you and I think about that the student doesn't think about but about a year ago, I had some students that were going away to college and they needed to get some solo stuff done. And we let the students schedule themselves. And what we ended up creating was the students were scheduling solos every day, and then if they. The weather was bad, they just weren't doing it. And we took the ability for a student to schedule a solo away from them using Flight Schedule Pro.
29:41
Bobby Doss
And I did start paying someone to watch the weather T minus four days out, and we started reserving aircraft with Flight Schedule Pro. So we reserved a high wing and a low wing, and we started watching the weather, and we started putting the solos all this manually ourselves to where the students that were on a solo priority list were being put on those reserved aircraft. And we found that a student that was taking three months to get through solo was getting done with their solo requirements in, like, 10 days. And the students hated it. They're like, you can't believe you're taking this away from us. I can't believe you're doing this to us. You're going to. You're going to hoard. You're going to hoard the schedule instead of us hoarding the schedule.
30:17
Bobby Doss
But we quickly realized, and they quickly realized that through that effort, they were all getting done much faster and the schedule was cleaned up and more people were able to fly those instruments. Students could fly, those commercial students could fly. And it's changed the way we think about the schedule all up in partnership with your team. I think what we've built with Flight Schedule Pro and the automation of the scheduling is only going to help even more and know who's falling behind and where. We have bookends like Liberty students that have college semesters. We're going to be able to see progress midpoint of semester, end of semester. And it's just going to be a win for the student, although they're going to not feel like that in the very beginning because we're going to take a little bit more control of the scheduling.
31:00
Bobby Doss
But I'm excited about what the future holds as it relates to some of that automation and the ability to prioritize those students that need it for differing reasons.
31:08
Nick Wagner
Yeah, no, that's. You hit a hot topic within. Within our customer base. You know, we. We described as centralized versus decentralized scheduling. And so, you know, when it's decentralized, it's the students, the flight instructors are all just kind of. It's a free for all, right? Everybody's scheduling whenever they can versus, you know, completely centralized, you know, schedule Is, you know, you've got three people sitting in a room driving all the schedules, you know, creating them daily, weekly, making the adjustments. And so really what we're finding is the more centralized it is, the more you can optimize it.
31:52
Nick Wagner
Right.
31:52
Nick Wagner
And to your point, it's better for the students, better for the instructors. They don't like it at first, but there's ways you can kind of ease in, you know, going from one extreme to the other. And it's a lot of people using a hybrid approach too. You know, they're driving the schedule for a certain group of students and then allowing others to kind of fall in behind that. So there's many ways you can do it, you know, and that's, we're spending a lot of time with our customers, you know, figuring out which are the different, how do you optimize that, which are the best ways, which are the best policies, practices.
32:26
Nick Wagner
Right.
32:27
Nick Wagner
That need to be in place to really optimize and drive everybody through their training as quickly as and as efficiently as possible. So yeah, you were definitely dealing with the same thing that a lot of other people are dealing with that we're working with them to solve.
32:43
Bobby Doss
The interesting component is we're in that paradigm shift of all free for all to. We're going to have a pretty big control of the schedule and I think the CFIs are pushing back on it, the students are pushing back on it. But just like I told everybody last year when I was taking student solos away, you all thought it was the worst idea in the world and it has really and truly helped the students so much and the instructor, because we freed up so much schedule time and we really do use your flight ops dashboards and some of the business intelligence that you are giving the operator to see just how much we're impacting utilization.
33:19
Bobby Doss
Without changing the fleet size and without changing the instructor count, we're seeing double digit growth in the school while not making any capital investments or any capital changes or people changes. And as scheduling gets more automated, it's only going to get better of reducing my expenses and then increasing our utilization across the board, which is going to be a win for students whether they believe it or not.
33:44
Nick Wagner
Yeah, I mean, proofs in the pudding, right? We get them through faster and they're not going over the minimum requirements just by 10x. You know, they're going to be saving money and you know, ultimately achieving their goals quicker.
33:59
Nick Wagner
Right.
33:59
Nick Wagner
And that's the whole Point of this, you know, I think from an instructor standpoint, you know, deploying this kind of technology in these different, you know, procedures and policies actually helps them train more and build hours quicker. So if their goal is to, you know, go fly for an airline or commercially like this, you know, doing it this way could potentially get them there quicker if that's ultimately where they want to end up. Which I know puts a strain on you, Bobby, as the instructors leave, right?
34:32
Bobby Doss
Oh yeah. More recruiting.
34:34
Nick Wagner
Precious resource today.
34:35
Bobby Doss
So, so maybe that'll lead me to my next bullet and the one that we'll kind of close out with a little bit. And that's my future feature request for you as the CEO. One of those would be a recruiting dashboard so I could recruit my CFIs a little bit. You know, a lot of my CFIs come from internal. I try to build, I've tried to share this message with a lot of people that it would be nice if I, in a perfect world, I'd like to hire a third of my instructors from this school, a third of my instructors from the bigger corporate conglomerate type schools.
35:04
Bobby Doss
When you think of that, I'm thinking Spartan ATP, American Flyers, so that I can get a taste of what they get in my instructor team and then a group, a third of the instructors from other flight schools. And I bet all these people are flying and using Flight Schedule Pro. And I could see some, you know, see some information if they were using log 10 as their log book. But it would be nice. You know, one thing every flight school needs is a, is a way to manage the recruiting of flight instructors. And you know, I use a third party tool because it's not part of my flight management system. So request number one is a lightweight recruiting tool built into Flight Schedule Pro for the operator because we all need it.
35:42
Bobby Doss
Whether we have one plane and two instructors, or whether we have 20 planes and 25 instructors, we need that mechanism. And you're sitting on all that data. So that's request one. And we have a co host that has listened unfortunately a lot more today than talked and Wally Mulhern, and he's a designated pilot examiner. I've said this for years. You're sitting on a gold mine to make a DPE tool on top of Flight Schedule Pro. And I think we tipped our toes into some of that pre recording. But man, Wally, you do use Flight Schedule Pro both as a student, a customer of United Flight Systems and other places, I'm sure. But how do you use it as A dp. Do you see stuff in the system?
36:20
Wally Mulhern
Oh yeah, I do. And it depends on what access a given flight school will allow me to have and when I can look at the schedule. You know, I might have a checkride with a student tomorrow and may or down the road, say five days down the road. And I've got their information, but they failed to tell me what the airplane type was. And it's real simple. If it's scheduled in flight schedule Pro, I'll just pull it up and look at and say, oh, they're in 1, 2, 3, Bravo Charlie. And I know that's, you know, a PA 28 161. So when I do my pre approval I can, it just makes life easier.
37:05
Wally Mulhern
You know, I can go in and, you know, I might have a, something come up in my life, you know, a doctor's appointment or something, thinking, oh gee, I need to try to move this checkride for this person on the, you know, the 5th of August. And, and before I even do that, you know, a lot of times I'll go in, I'll say, well, do we even have flexibility to move the airplane? And you know, I'll look and I'll say, well, hey, it's got two hours behind it. So it makes it real nice to then call up the student say hey, can we. We, you know, move our time two hours, that kind of stuff. So yeah, it is something that I use not a lot, but it's really nice to have.
37:49
Bobby Doss
Well, and I'll tempt my, my feature request, right? Imagine if you had their certification in your hand and you had their cell phone number at your fingertip and you had a list of all your upcoming checkrides with the flight school named United Flight Systems. I think there's a lot of opportunity there, Nick. I won't go on, but I am an ideas guy and I'll help you execute on it. But I am an ideas guy.
38:10
Nick Wagner
No, this is great. You know, we hear about the DPE problem frequently.
38:15
Nick Wagner
Right.
38:16
Nick Wagner
And all the coordination that's got to take place and just how there's not enough of you out there, Wally, to kind of take care of all the demand. So yeah, absolutely would be interested in hearing how we could help with that.
38:29
Bobby Doss
Well, maybe we'll have a part two some months away from now where we're sharing the newly released designated Pilot examiner module inside of flight schedule Pro and logged in. I think there's, we started tracking Milestone photos Nick I think it's just a custom document, but if other fly schools have questions on how I use Fly Schedule Pro again, I've created every trick in the trade that I can inside of Fly Schedule Pro. Every student now can go see every milestone photo that they've ever taken from their solo to their CFI initial checkride photo because it's a custom dock in Flight Schedule Pro. Others have ideas and they want to share with me. Obviously you can send an email To Bobby United Flight.com if you think my DPE idea is a really good one.
39:17
Bobby Doss
You can send an email to Bobby behind the Prop and I'll forward it to Nick and we'll get his team developing on that right away. Nick, I appreciate you joining the show. I think the listeners will enjoy and appreciate what Fly Schedule Pro and Log 10 are doing for the aviation community. And if you get out and fly this weekend, make sure you stay behind the prop. Thanks for joining us.
39:37
Nick Wagner
Thanks Bobby. Thanks Wally.
39:40
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@bravetheprop.com behind the Prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss. Co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember, fly safe.