Geneva, Switzerland, 22 May 2019, Angus Batey – Skylegs Offers One-Stop for Flight Ops and Sales at the European Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition, the annual meeting place for business aviation community in 2019.
Skylegs has signed on with Web Manuals as a launch member of their online shop. This arrangement brings Web Manuals’ documentation services to Skylegs customers, the integration saving them having to log in to multiple websites.
“Our company makes software for an operator to use in their daily operations,” Skylegs MD and co-founder Maxim Schelfhout tells ShowNews. “They use the software to make quotes to end clients, to brokers, and so on; then they send that to our scheduler, and the dispatcher starts preparing the flights, sending out handler requests, attaching crew, making sure their training is up to date, and doing all the calculations.
“Basically, everything operational and sales-related is done in our software, online.”
Skylegs customers can view all the different elements of flight-ops planning, billing and associated paperwork through a single web-based on-screen interface. The tool also supports electronic flight bags and pilot currency, training and scheduling tasks. Data are stored in commercial cloud infrastructure provided by Amazon Web Services, meaning they can be accessed anywhere, so long as the customer has access to the internet. Skylegs charges customers per aircraft, per month. The system is modular, so smaller operators who may not need all the functions can opt to pay less and only have access to the parts that they need.
The main benefit it brings is to unify what are at present usually several different, standalone software systems into a single cloud-based application. Bringing these functions together was driven by real-world need. Schelfhout and his co-founders are all pilots as well as software coders, and the system started out as what he calls “a basement project” to create a pilot logbook app; this was then developed into a system that was also capable of unifying the training, booking and invoicing systems for flying clubs and flight schools.
Expanding it into a product for the wider commercial aviation marketplace was the logical next step. But it has presented challenges for Schelfhout and his small team (the company, based at Antwerp airport, currently has 10 staff, including its founders).
“It’s difficult, certainly to show people the advantages, and the return on investment they will be able to make,” he says. “In the end, if everything goes well, they’ll be able to do more with the same amount of people.
“Mostly, they’re fed up of working with several different softwares together, having separate logins, and having to type the same information in again into different systems,” he adds. “They just want something integrated, so they’re always keen to look into making improvements in that area.”
Skylegs is still a young company – Schelfhout says they have been selling the service for about six years – but it has recently become profitable, and its 30-odd customers range from operators with a single aircraft up to one client “with 35 aircraft and multiple AOCs.” This year marks their second appearance at EBACE – they had a stand in the first-time exhibitors’ area in 2018 – and Schelfhout is optimistic of converting some leads into sales.
Read the full article at https://aviationweek.com/ebace-2019/skylegs-offers-one-stop-flight-ops
