Flight training board
Each day is a bar from 0600 to 2200. A shaded stretch is open end to end, so a 3-hour lesson can start at any :00 or :30 inside it. The 1900–2200 tail of the bar is there for night flights.
My availability: tap a day’s bar to edit its windows. Instructor mode: Book a lesson drops a green lesson where you tap; tap that green bar again to assign a tail number or remove it. Mark unavailable blocks times the instructor can’t teach, shown as red hatching, which can’t be booked over.
A window is continuous, so a tap lands on the nearest half hour that fits — which is not always the one you meant. Move the pointer across a day’s bar before you tap and a dashed marker shows exactly the slot you would get, times and all; if nothing there will take a 3-hour lesson it says so instead. After booking, the editor opens on that lesson with its Start time at the top: nudge it −30 or +30 minutes, or pick a start from the list, and the block moves as you do. Only starts that actually fit — inside a window, clear of the instructor’s blocks and of the other lessons — are offered.
Tap a booked lesson and choose Reschedule… to move it to another day or time. Pick the new date and the new time — only days and starts with room for it are listed — and Save. The original booking is gone and the new one takes its place, carrying the aircraft and any logbook entry with it, and the lesson is marked as rescheduled: a ↻ on its block, the first slot it was booked into in the Booked lessons list and in History, and the full story in the editor. Rescheduling a canceled lesson puts it back on — the cancellation it came from is kept in the note. Shifting a booking you have just placed, before you leave the editor, counts as fixing the tap and is not marked.
Every day’s bar is shaded where the sun is down: a solid wash outside civil twilight, a hatched wash through twilight itself, with dashed markers at sunrise (☀) and sunset (☾) carrying the times. A booked lesson that runs past civil twilight gets a moon on it, and the lists say how much of it is night. The times are computed on the spot from the field’s latitude and longitude — no network needed — and land within a minute or two of the published tables. Night for logging is 14 CFR 1.1: end of evening civil twilight to the start of morning civil twilight, which is the edge the board draws. Position lights (91.209) go on at sunset, and the 61.57(b) night-landing currency window is an hour tighter on each end. Confirm against an official source before you log anything close to an edge.
Weeks alternate from pickup Monday 17:00 to drop-off the following Monday 08:00. The tab down the left edge of each week says which kind it is — in My availability the owner taps it to flip the week; in instructor mode it is a label only. Solo weeks are 0600–0900 and 1500–1900 Mon–Thu, 0600–1900 Fri–Sun. Daughter weeks are closed Mon–Thu, 0900–1500 Friday, 0900–1600 with her along on the weekend.
Tap a booked lesson to cancel it for weather or availability, before or after its time has passed — in My availability that is all the tap offers, in instructor mode it sits with the time, aircraft and reschedule. A canceled lesson turns faded red, drops out of the logbook and out of Next up, and stays painted on its board. Delete (instructor mode) is for entry mistakes — it erases the lesson everywhere. Reinstate puts a canceled lesson back.
The board keeps eight weeks ahead of today live, and the Week / Month switch in the toolbar swaps the boards for a month grid of the same dates. Weeks that are finished drop off the boards; tap a day on the Month grid to bring its week back and land on it. Booked lessons, at the foot of the Week view, lists what is still to fly; flown and canceled lessons are the Flights tab’s and Home’s.
Flights fills in on its own once a booked lesson’s end time has passed — then you add HOBBS time, the aircraft, the airports and runways, takeoff and landing counts, and the individual elements you worked. Takeoffs and landings are counted separately, day and night, so a takeoff-only lesson logs as exactly that. Skills tracks all of it against the FAA Part 61.109 minimums and shows how much of each area of operation you have covered. Ground school at the bottom of that tab is Sporty’s Learn to Fly Course lesson by lesson — open a module, check off each video as you watch it, and the bar follows the six required modules. The three optional modules check off whole and stay out of the count, and the thirteen knowledge areas of 61.105(b) sit underneath with the knowledge test and practice scores.
The 3-hour booked block is what gets billed as instruction. HOBBS time is what counts toward the 61.109 minimums. The board keeps them apart everywhere, including in Cost.
Cost on Home is built from the rate sheet: aircraft on HOBBS, instruction on the booked block, fuel on top for dry-rated tails. The invoice arrives weeks later and never matches to the dollar, so two things sit alongside it. Card fee and per-flight extras are the differences that repeat — the processing fee on a card payment and the fixed adds on every flight, like a headset rental — and they apply themselves to every flight. Actual costs is the list underneath for everything else: a one-off like ground school, or a true-up line when a bill came in high or low. Amounts can be negative for a credit. Spent so far is the estimate plus all of it; Per flight hour and the estimate to 40 hours use only the money that scales with flying, so a one-off like ground school does not get projected forward.
Both lists live on the Flights tab and start collapsed. Aircraft carry a card rate, a cash rate, and a wet or dry basis — dry rates exclude fuel, so cost adds burn × fuel price. Instructors carry an hourly rate; the one picked on a flight sets the instruction cost for that flight.
The Weather tab has current conditions at KJYO, a go/no-go read for the next booked lesson, a three-day outlook, and a radar loop. The go/no-go scores every hour of the lesson block against student VFR limits — ceiling 3,000, visibility 5 sm, wind 15 kt, crosswind 12 kt — from the NWS gridded forecast, with ceiling and visibility filled in from the KIAD TAF, since the grid publishes neither for this area. It only turns on inside 48 hours; further out you get an outlook, and past a week it says so. It is advisory: your CFI’s personal minimums are the ones that count.
Staying current: the tab refetches weather.gov whenever you open it and the last read is more than ten minutes old, when the window comes back to the front, and on its own every ten minutes while you are looking at it. The line under the conditions says how old the observation is and when it was last checked — and if KJYO stops reporting for more than about an hour it says so in red rather than quietly showing an old reading. Refresh forces a fresh pull any time.
Owners get Info & frequencies in the avatar menu: pick any airport within 100 nm of KJYO and it lists the published radio frequencies for that field — ATIS or AWOS, CTAF and UNICOM, tower, ground, clearance, the Potomac approach sector, Flight Service — along with field elevation and runways, and a flag if the field sits inside the DC SFRA or the Flight Restricted Zone. Below that is the short list worth having set on every flight. It is reference material carried in the page, not a live feed, so it ages: confirm anything against the current FAA Chart Supplement before you use it. Print the page for a one-sheet copy — the picker drops off the printout.
The Plan tab is what comes along instead of paper. Plan the flight in SkyVector, then type the route here as idents and checkpoint names — airports from the list are placed on their own, anything else is a checkpoint to place on the chart or by latitude and longitude. The nav log works out every leg from the coordinates: distance, true and magnetic course, the wind correction and magnetic heading off the winds aloft you type (as °T, the way the forecast reads), groundspeed, time and fuel, with totals and whether the flight earns cross-country credit. Load a screenshot of the chart, then Calibrate two fields on it — pick the field, tap it on the picture — and the route is drawn over the chart and Add checkpoint turns a tap into a waypoint with coordinates. The picture is only ever a picture; nothing is measured off it. In the airplane the one input is Over on each checkpoint: it records the time, works out the actual groundspeed, and revises every estimate after it. The chart is saved on the device, so the line under the plan says on the ground whether it will open in the air.
A Friends & family account follows along and changes nothing. It gets Home, Weather, Month, Flights and Skills — the hours, the logbook, the cost, the progress bars — and no Schedule tab, no edit controls, and no way to save. Invite one from Administration in the avatar menu. Read-only is enforced in the database, not just hidden in the page.
Everything saves to the database as you type. The line under the tabs shows the last sync. If it says changes are held in this browser, you are offline — they go up as soon as you reconnect.