Airman Certification Standards tracking
PreflightLog holds every lesson grade, endorsement, hour count and stage check for your whole roster in one panel you can read between flights. The binder stack stays on the shelf, and nobody arrives at the checkride guessing.
Squawk list
Nobody became a flight instructor to maintain a filing cabinet. Yet the record keeping decides whether a student solos on schedule, whether a checkride happens on the day it was booked, and whether the school can prove any of it two years later.
Grades are penciled on a stage sheet, the sheet lives in a folder, and the folder lives wherever the last instructor left it. When a task gets missed, you discover it during the stage check, not before.
A repeated stage check runs about $265 in aircraft and instructor time, given twice.Your Tuesday CFI thinks the student is weak on short field landings. Your Saturday CFI has been drilling steep turns for three weeks. The student pays for both opinions and progresses at half the rate.
Roughly 4.1 extra dual hours per private student, near $1,000 of avoidable training.A solo endorsement with the wrong regulation reference, or a 90 day window that quietly expired, sends the applicant home from the examiner's office. The airplane was rented, the block was held, and the fee is gone.
A rescheduled practical test costs $900 in examiner fees and six weeks of calendar.Weather cancels two lessons, work travel eats a third, and suddenly it has been five weeks. By the time anyone calls, the student has cooled off and the remaining training goes to the school on the other side of the field.
Each lapsed private student walks with about $4,100 of unfinished training.Flow
PreflightLog is built around the way a lesson actually ends: engine off, notes on the kneeboard, twenty minutes before the next student walks in. Everything below fits inside that window.
Import students from a spreadsheet or type them in. Choose the certificate each one is chasing, private, instrument, commercial or CFI, and PreflightLog builds the full task grid from the matching Airman Certification Standards.
Tap the tasks you flew and set each to introduced, practiced, performed or ACS standard. Add the ground time, the dual given and a two line note on what to fly next. It takes about ninety seconds on a phone.
Pick the endorsement, confirm the student and the aircraft make and model, and PreflightLog fills the text with the correct regulation reference and date. Copy it into the paper logbook and the record is kept on both sides.
Every student shows a readiness figure built from task coverage, recency and required aeronautical experience. Book the practical test when the board is green, not when the calendar looks free.
Panel layout
Each part of PreflightLog answers a question a flight instructor asks out loud most weeks. Nothing here is a dashboard for the sake of a dashboard.
Every area of operation and every task from the relevant Airman Certification Standards appears as a live grid, colored by the last grade you gave it. Open any square to see the date, the aircraft, the instructor and the note attached to that attempt.
Solo, solo cross country, 90 day renewals, knowledge test, practical test and flight review endorsements are held with their regulation references and the date each one was given. The library flags anything that has aged out before the student shows up for the flight.
One figure per student, built from task coverage at ACS standard, how recently each task was flown, and the aeronautical experience still outstanding. Chief instructors use it to decide which three students go to a stage check this week.
Cross country legs over fifty nautical miles, night takeoffs and landings, simulated instrument time, solo hours and total dual received all tally themselves as you log lessons. The counters map to the experience paragraphs for the private, instrument and commercial certificates.
PreflightLog watches the 90 day solo window, the student pilot certificate, the medical, the make and model limitation and the wind conditions written into each solo endorsement. Alerts land in your inbox the Sunday before they matter, not the morning of.
When a student flies with a different CFI, that instructor opens one screen: last three lesson grades, weak tasks, the exact endorsement history and the next recommended lesson. Substitute instructors stop starting from zero, and students stop paying for repeated ground.
Measured across 1,180 instructor accounts
These figures come from schools that ran a full year on PreflightLog and shared their before and after numbers with us in February 2026.
Median across 214 private pilot applicants. The gain comes from catching missed tasks in week six instead of week eighteen, and from booking the examiner off the readiness board.
A full time instructor carrying fourteen students used to spend most of a working day on stage sheets, endorsement copies and progress emails. Grading at the airplane collapses that into minutes.
Up from 81% across the same schools the year before. Applicants arrive with every task flown to standard inside the recency window, and the examiner gets a clean record instead of a shoebox.
The quiet roster report lists anyone who has not flown in eighteen days with a suggested next lesson. Schools that call from that list recover about one student in three before the gap becomes permanent.
Pilot reports
I teach out of one hangar with eleven students and no front desk. Before this I kept stage sheets in a canvas bag and rewrote the same solo endorsement four times a month. Now I grade the tasks while the engine is still ticking and the endorsement text is right there with the correct paragraph. Two of my students went to their practical test in January and the examiner said the records were the cleanest he had seen from a single instructor operation.
We run seven airplanes and nine instructors, and the handoff was killing us. A student would fly with whoever was available and lose a lesson every time re-teaching ground we had already covered. The handoff file fixed that in about three weeks. Our average private pilot now finishes around nine hours below where we used to sit, and I stopped refunding stage checks.
The readiness gauge is the part I did not expect to care about. I used to schedule the examiner on a feeling and get burned twice a year when a task turned out stale. Now I look at the board on Sunday night, pick the two applicants sitting above the line, and call the DPE with confidence. Our last eighteen practical tests all went on the first attempt.
Rates
One rate per operation, every feature included at every level. The only thing that changes is how many instructors and students the account carries.
For the instructor who owns the students, the schedule and the paperwork.
$25
per month, USD
For a field operation with a handful of airplanes and a shared roster.
$79
per month, USD
For multi base training operations running structured stage syllabi.
$179
per month, USD
Every plan is billed monthly in US dollars and can be cancelled at any time from inside the account. No annual commitment, no setup fee, and your records export in full on the way out.
Before you ask
The Independent CFI plan is $25 per month, Flight School is $79 per month and Academy is $179 per month, all billed in US dollars. Every tier includes every feature; the only difference is how many instructor logins and active students the account carries. If you grow past a tier we move you up on the next billing date and prorate the difference, and you can move back down just as easily after a quiet winter. There is no setup fee and no annual commitment.
Most independent instructors are grading lessons the same evening they open the account. Bring a spreadsheet with student names, the certificate each one is chasing and their current hours, and the import maps it in a few minutes; if you would rather start clean, add each student the first time they fly with you. A school with several instructors usually spends one ninety minute session with us to map its stage structure onto the task grids. The longest changeover we have run took six days, and that operation had four bases.
The records belong to the instructor or the school that created them. They are stored on servers in the United States, encrypted in transit and at rest, with daily backups held for thirty days. Only the instructors on your account and the students you invite can open a student file, and student access is read only. You can export the entire account as PDF endorsement records and CSV lesson data at any time, including after you close the account.
PreflightLog exports lesson and hour data as CSV in the column layout most club scheduling and billing tools accept, and it imports flight time from any logbook that can produce a CSV export, so the aeronautical experience counters stay honest. There is a read only calendar feed you can subscribe to from Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook. Academy accounts also get a documented web API for operations that push training data into their own reporting. None of these connections carry an extra charge.
You cancel from the billing screen inside the account and the plan stops at the end of the month you have already paid for. We do not ask for a reason and there is no exit fee. Your records stay available in read only form for sixty days so you can pull every export you need, and endorsement records download as a single PDF file per student. If you come back later, the account reopens with the history intact.
No, and we are careful about this. You still write and sign the endorsement in the student's logbook, exactly as you do now. What PreflightLog gives you is the current wording with the correct regulation reference and date, a permanent copy of every endorsement you have issued, and a warning before a 90 day solo window closes. Instructors have to keep a record of the endorsements they give for three years, and that is precisely the record this keeps, so when an examiner or an inspector asks, you print the file instead of hunting through old logbooks.
The Right Seat
The Right Seat is the PreflightLog magazine for independent CFIs and small flight schools. It covers the regulations that decide whether a student flies, the paperwork an examiner reads first, and the arithmetic behind an hour of dual.
Practical guide
Before a student flies alone the regulation asks for a written test you wrote and graded, a make and model endorsement with a clock on it, and limitations in writing. Here is how the pieces fit.
Comparison
The certificate you operate under sets your minimum hours, your staffing, your paperwork and who is allowed to pay you. A look at the course outline, the chief instructor rule and the money on both sides.
Mistakes to avoid
Examiners read the paperwork before they look at the airplane. Missing knowledge test deficiency sign offs, stale recommendation dates and borrowed wording send applicants home before the preflight begins.
Request a walkthrough
Tell us how many students you carry and how you track them today. We will walk your own roster through PreflightLog on a screen share, in about twenty five minutes, and you will leave knowing whether it fits your operation.
Demos run Monday to Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Central time. If you fly weekends, say so in the message and we will find an evening slot.
