This is our general news and announcements page.
We've just released a new feature that several of you have been asking for — booking requests with staff approval.
What's changed
You can now configure certain member roles so that instead of booking directly, those members request a booking. The booking is held immediately (so nobody else can grab it), but it sits in a pending state until a staff member confirms or rejects it.
If you're making use of an Office Display in your system, we have improved it for you by making it full screen. This removes all the surrounding colours, tabs, breadcrumbs and so on, leaving just the bookings for the day (see below).
To switch to this view, use the office display to view the bookings and click Display full screen.
The full screen version still has manual navigation, if you want to quickly check tomorrow's bookings for example.
When booking out or logging a flight, you've always been able to select from your most-visited airfields with a single tap. For anywhere else, the system has searched your previously entered destinations to surface the most common ones — "Turweston", for example.
That works well for established clubs with a rich history of logged destinations. But if you're new to the system — or you simply want consistent, standardised airfield names — there's now a better option.
Every flight school has the same recurring problem: something gets noticed, someone mentions it to someone else, and three days later nobody can agree on whether it was ever actually fixed. The defect management system in Flight School Booking is designed to close that gap permanently.
This is a new defect reporting and management system, and it's optional, but we’ve added it to all systems because it will surely help keep track of everything. It's available but we haven't turned it on; you can do that under Admin > Defects.
If you've ever tried to keep on top of who's signed the latest version of your club's terms and conditions, who's read the new solo hire rules, or who's actually agreed to that training policy you sent round last spring — this one's for you.
The new Agreements feature in Flight School Booking gives you a clean way to publish documents and capture proper, audit-ready responses from the people who need to read them.
You may be using the system to keep track of maintenance and expiry dates for aircraft insurance, radio licence etc., but have use of aircraft that you're not responsible for.
Until now, if someone else is responsible for an aircraft in your booking system, you would have either forwarded reminder emails to them, or given them full access as an engineer to all your aircraft.
From now on, you can choose a specific person to receive reminders instead of the office staff and engineer roles - See screenshot below.
If you've been using the billing system for a while, you'll no doubt have a few price groups. More than just simply STUDENT and MEMBER. Probably you have some people on a special deal of some sort, and a special price group to match. So we expect it has been quite a manual job managing the prices as the years go by.
In an effort to help, we've added a new form to the Price groups list under Admin > Billing > Price groups.
We have added a separate type of document called a Safety Bulletin. Anyone can raise a Safety Report, which goes to safety management staff. Once a report has been read and understood by staff, it can be closed, commented on (etc) in the same was as before. But it can also be published as a safety bulletin. As part of the process, you pick which groups the bulletin applies to. Often it won't apply to associate members or air experience people for example.
New booking report, with a focus on cancellations
A new Booking lead time & cancellation trends report is available, which may help you understand booking behaviour at your school. It answers questions like:
One of the quiet frustrations of any scheduling grid is that it was designed for someone else’s operation. Most booking systems hand you a wide grid built for a busy ops desk, then expect a student to make sense of it on a phone screen.
Flight School Booking takes the opposite starting point. The default view is built for the person who books most often — the student — and the wide grid is there for the schools that genuinely need it.
