How aircraft maintenance tracking software handles inspection due dates, Hobbs-based alerts, squawk management, and fleet airworthiness status — for flight schools, flying clubs, and private owners.
Keeping an aircraft airworthy is a compliance problem as much as a mechanical one. The FAA doesn't care that your spreadsheet was updated last week if your aircraft's transponder check lapsed last month. Good maintenance tracking software makes airworthiness compliance systematic, rather than something that depends on someone remembering to check a spreadsheet.
Here's what to look for in aircraft maintenance tracking software, whether you're managing a single aircraft or a training fleet.
An aircraft has multiple recurring inspection requirements, each with different intervals. A typical general aviation aircraft needs:
| Inspection | Interval |
|---|---|
| Annual | Calendar: 12 months |
| 100-Hour | Flight hours: 100 hrs SMOH |
| Transponder check | Calendar: 24 months |
| ELT battery | Calendar or hours-based |
| Pitot-static/IFR altimeter | Calendar: 24 months |
| ADs (Airworthiness Directives) | Varies — some recurring, some one-time |
Track all of this manually across multiple aircraft and something will eventually slip. The transponder check due in November gets missed because the annual was in September and October was busy. An AD with a 500-hour recurrence interval gets forgotten because it was signed off three years ago and nobody updated the tracking sheet.
The system should handle all of the inspection types listed above, plus any custom checks specific to your operation. Each inspection should record:
Inspections with hour-based intervals (100-hour, engine overhaul, AD recurrences) need to alert based on Hobbs time, not just calendar dates. This means the tracking system needs to know the aircraft's current Hobbs reading, which comes from the flight log.
This is why maintenance tracking and flight logging need to be in the same system. If your flight logs and maintenance records live in separate tools, the Hobbs-based alerts will always be behind the actual flight time.
When a flight is logged in Aloft360, the aircraft's Hobbs total updates automatically. The maintenance module uses that running total to calculate when the next 100-hour is due and fires an alert when you're within 10 hours.
A squawk is a defect or discrepancy found by a pilot or mechanic. Squawks need to be:
The squawk board is the bridge between pilots (who notice things) and mechanics (who fix them). Without a shared system, squawks get lost on sticky notes or forgotten between shifts.
For an operation with multiple aircraft, the dashboard view is critical. You need to know at a glance:
This isn't just operationally useful. It's a dispatching tool. When a student shows up for a lesson and their assigned aircraft is red on the board, you know immediately before they walk out to the ramp.
Every maintenance action should be logged with:
This creates a full maintenance history per aircraft, useful for resale, insurance renewals, and FAA inspections.
One of the most useful features in a good maintenance tracking platform is the workflow from open squawk to maintenance log entry. Here's how it should work:
Without this workflow, squawks get filed and forgotten. With it, every reported issue is tracked to resolution.
Generic maintenance software (like what's sold to auto shops or general contractors) doesn't understand aviation-specific intervals, AD tracking, or the relationship between Hobbs time and inspection due dates. You'll spend more time customizing it than if you'd used a spreadsheet.
Paper logbooks without a digital layer are legally compliant but don't give you dashboard visibility or automatic alerts. For a multi-aircraft operation, manually calculating due dates for every inspection on every aircraft every month is not a sustainable administrative process.
Siloed tools (separate apps for maintenance, scheduling, and flight logging) create data integrity problems. The maintenance tracker doesn't know the aircraft flew 12 hours last week unless someone manually enters it.
If you own one aircraft, the tracking requirements are the same but the scale is more manageable. The value of software is the alerts: being notified 30 days before your annual and 10 hours before your 100-hour means you can schedule maintenance proactively rather than reactively.
Aloft360 Starter ($9/mo) handles a single aircraft with all inspection types, squawk tracking, and flight logging. The maintenance dashboard shows your aircraft's status at a glance. For owners who fly occasionally and can't afford an unplanned maintenance AOG, the cost of the software is nothing compared to the cost of an emergency annual.
At 3–10 aircraft, the case for software is even stronger. One overdue transponder check on one aircraft is a compliance incident. Five aircraft without systematic tracking is a compliance problem that compounds quickly.
The key questions to evaluate:
For more on running a compliant fleet, see our guides on FAA Part 61 compliance and flight school management software. The Aloft360 help documentation also covers how to set up inspection tracking and configure due-date alerts.