SkySoar

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  SkySoar: Improving safety amongst glider pilots by making the pilot's past flights and practice state easily accessible.

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  Dashboard: Gives glider pilots detailed insights into their flight logs and training state.

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  Flight Logs: Glider pilots can log and review their flight data.

Inspiration

I see many glider pilots leaving out the important step of practice state calculation, when preparing for a flight. This is a safety risk in the private aviation sector that could easily be treated: Meet SkySoar.

What it does

SkySoar lets glider pilots log their flights and calculates the current practice state for the pilot. This way practice state information is always accessible: Pilots don't have to do tedious calculations anymore, which is a key factor why practice state is often neglected.

How I built it

The commonly used practice state categorisation has been brought forward by the German Aero Club. The three categories are shown here.

For practice state calculation, the app needs access to the flight data (hours and number of starts) of the pilot in the last six months, therefore the app has to have a flight log feature, where the pilot inputs the flight data. This gave the idea to create a dashboard, as the flight data is available anyways, as an additional feature.

Challenges I ran into

1. Complex Data: Turns out that a flight log isn't that easy to model: The data model wasn't easy to set up as flight logs have quite some tricky parameters (example: when a pilot flies as an instructor the flight time needs to be calculated as instructor time as well as pilot-in-command time).

2. User Experience If I want users to really use my app on the long run I need to convince them of the benefit of this app before they go through the process of entering all their flights of the past six months. Therefore I made a feature that let's users add sample flight logs: This way users can experience the full functionality of the app without having to add all their own flights first.

3. App Review It took me 3.5 weeks to get through App Review at Apple: This is my first app I have ever submitted to App Review, so there were things I didn't know about (mainly about how to submit subscriptions and in-app purchases to App Review). My next visit at App Review will probably go a lot faster, since I have learned a lot from this first App Review process!

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm new to software engineering: This is my very first app (and my first ever "official" software project!) and I'm very proud that I made it into the App Store :-)

What I learned

My first time using RevenueCat, my first time submitting an app to App Review: I learned how this process works and what to look out for.

Key Learnings:

• If you submit an app to App Review which contains a subscription you have to add your (already created) subscription again on the version page. Else the reviewer won't have access to it and a test-purchase will fail.
• It's worth it to think through your data model well. Consider complex properties of your data that you're trying to model. It might seem easy at first but consider that every small little spot in your app where that property should appear will require you to handle that complexity.

What's next for SkySoar

I see a ton of potential: Glider pilots are very data-driven people and are always eager to get insights into their flight data. There's a lot of potential for more features and I have a long list of feature ideas already.

Built With

• revenuecat
• revenuecatui
• swift
• swiftui