Articles about aviation technology, with project updates and practical advice.
We joined the "Digital Transformation in Business Aviation: Where Do We Stand?" panel at the Elite Wings Aviation Summit in Montreal, days after the Canadian Business Aviation Association (CBAA) Innovation Stage in Calgary. We discussed IT spending, software choices, and the work needed to put a tool into use.
At the CBAA Innovation Stage in Calgary, we talked about how much software operators rent, and how AI has made building their own a practical option for the first time in thirty years.
Dolores, our own AI assistant, replaced Intercom and Calendly, about $300 a month between them, for $5 to $10 a month in usage. She books meetings and answers questions on this site.
The software industry is worth $300 billion and depends on writing code being difficult. AI and low-code tools let people with business knowledge build more of their own software.
An AI-drafted Minimum Equipment List (MEL) that Transport Canada approved after two rounds of feedback. A brand new MEL for a new aircraft type is ready for review in under a week instead of months.
I've walked into enough charter operations to know what I'm going to find before I even sit down. Five different systems that don't talk to each other. A dispatch coordinator who's basically become a human API (application programming interface).
AI booked my vaccine at the far pharmacy. My wife laughed, then made the same booking mistake the next day. Only one of them can take feedback without me getting in trouble.
VOL announced on October 6 that AvPosts is partnering with the Canadian Business Aviation Association (CBAA). ForIT writes and runs the software, so here is our side: the CBAA bulletin spot, a compensation benchmark built from six survey editions, the 252 jobs on the board today, and what isn't finished yet.
A Part 135 charter operator's pilot iPads now update their flight-critical apps on their own. Each new version is tested on the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB) coordinator's iPad, pushed to the fleet on one approval or when a four-hour window runs out, and verified device by device. Battery health for every iPad sits in the same console.
ForIT writes and runs AvPosts, a Canadian aviation job board, with VOL and Shaan Bhanji. Here is how a posting gets from an operator's careers page to an application, and what employers told us to fix along the way.
Your staff are already using AI. Here's the program we run at operators to put guardrails around it: a written policy, corporate accounts, training, visibility, and AI built into the work with a person approving.
Great North Airlines runs two platforms for emergency response in Canada: one predicts where aircraft will be needed, and Fleet Call lets agencies commit them. ForIT helped build both.
Flat-fee aviation software locks customers into a fixed cost no matter how much they use it. Revenue-share models take a bigger cut as a company grows, which ends up penalizing success. There's a third option: open source the software and charge for services instead. That's the approach we're taking at ForIT, starting with the safety management system (SMS) and Crew Records.
Keeping crew records current at a Transport Canada regulated scheduled airline used to take up dispatch, the chief pilot and the lead flight attendant for about 40 hours a month of manual entry between them. Now the system handles the reading and cross-checking, and those same people spend 10 to 20 minutes a week reviewing and approving.
Great North Airlines replaced its crew scheduling and dispatch platform in under 90 days of implementation: first working session 20 October 2025, live 27 January 2026, legacy system off in February. We owned the implementation, from single sign-on for 89 users to the 15-minute data feed and the 20-plus reports finance and crew planning run on.
ForIT joined Ramp's partner program to connect expenses directly to the systems operators use to close their books, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and QuickBooks.
One Mac Mini runs my Claude Code instances, with ten lifecycle hooks to catch problems. This is the development setup we use at ForIT.
Great North Airlines' new website, built in about three weeks with AI instead of a 4 to 6 month agency project. Pages load in under 2 seconds on 3G, which matters for Northern Canada.
WM Aviation's failing Microsoft Power Pages site replaced with a fast custom site for charter and fixed base operator (FBO) customers, shipped in 4 weeks for about a third of what a traditional agency would have charged.
ForIT uses AI tools to build aviation software faster and at a lower cost. Here's how we use them.
Articles about aviation technology, lessons from client projects, and practical advice for managing IT.