Cleared for Takeoff: November Updates Arriving Tomorrow!

Big news today! BetterPlane has officially been approved by the App Store! You can check out the listing here: BetterPlane on the App Store.

I’m also really excited to be giving a talk on digitizing aircraft maintenance logbooks and my journey building BetterPlane tomorrow at the Historic Mineola-Wisener Airport. If you are in the area, I’d love to see you there!

Lastly, I’ve started adding Video Demos to the BetterPlane collection on Supademo: See the initial one I’ve released to the public here. The incredible Beta testers have been way too kind while having to deal with a beta app with practically NO instruction! I really want to thank my Beta Testers, all have been so incredibly helpful, and a few have gone above and beyond. A special thanks to Chris, Adam, Victor, and Tim. They’ve proactively surfaced ideas that have already made the app better to use.

We’re all set for the app release to go live tomorrow, November 22nd. I’ve been heads-down working on a mix of highly requested features and some crucial backend improvements to make everything run smoother. Here’s a quick look at what’s changed since the last blog post in September.

The Update List

• Under-the-Hood Upgrades: Improved the architecture and implementation of the extraction system. This new logbook extraction process is more accurate, faster and more robust, ensuring your logbooks are processed smoothly even during peak times. This system is working so well that I’ve decided to christen it “AirWrench AI™”
• Multi-Page Scanning: Added the ability to scan multi-page documents from images directly into PDF format within the Docs tab.
• Logbook Page Management: You can now safely move pages around in the logbook and make revisions to existing entry extractions.
• Component Updates: Streamlined the “Add Hours” flow. I hooked the process into the individual hours-based components, allowing you to update times directly from a component’s detail pop-up.
• Smarter Alerts: Overhauled the “Add Alert” flow with easier suggestions, interval logic improvements, and new sorting options (by Priority, Name, or Date).
• User Roles: Implemented strict role-based permissions: “Member” level users now have restricted view-only access where appropriate.
• Account Management: Your account can now have email AND phone based login. I’ve added the ability to verify and add your email or phone number directly in the User account screen.
• Support Access: Added a dedicated view linking to all Support options, including a direct link to view Demo Videos.
• UI/UX Polish: Expanded the “More Actions” menu (including on tablet), tweaked the onboarding flow for clarity, and improved page upload streams.
• Bug Fixes & Stability: Fixed search issues (hyphens allowed), date format flexibility for ADs, and general deep-linking and backend stability improvements.

Keep an eye out for the full App Store release tomorrow. As always, I’m building this for us, so please let me know if you run into any glitches or have ideas on how to make managing your aircraft even easier.

p.s. Android Beta is still under way and is coming soon! Everything is rocking-along, the focus just needed to be on iOS given the number of interested customers I have on iOS!

Fly safe!

• Jason