Here’s to a Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I hope that you had a wonderful Christmas and New Years Eve. It’s one of my favorite times of the year, and it’s always incredible to wrap my mind around the fact that another year has already passed.

I was also lucky enough to receive an early gift this year from my Wife: a Christmas lights tour around Ft. Worth in my favorite aircraft, a C-47/DC-3! If you’re not familiar with the importance of the C-47 in WWII, do yourself a favor and do a little digging. The usefulness and longevity of the aircraft is truly epic.

Okay, back on topic: it’s also exciting that in the last year, BetterPlane has grown from an App in testing to a full fledged production-grade platform with a steadily growing customer base. My goal with BetterPlane was always to make it easier for GA aircraft owners to manage their logbooks and maintenance, and I’m happy to hear from Users that the platform is making awesome progress towards that goal.

Looking into 2026, there’s still so much more ahead! Make sure to visit the “Suggest a feature” link in the App to add and vote for features to help shape the upcoming roadmap. Or as always, drop me a message directly!

IMPORTANT: If you are a customer and love the app, please leave a 5-star review on the App Store, it helps the platform grow and survive. If you don’t think it deserves a great review, please hit ‘reply’ on this email and lets talk about what can fix it!

Visit App Store: BetterPlane on the App Store

Now Available - Version 1.2.2

Today we celebrate the release of the another public version of the BetterPlane App. The biggest improvement? Fully automated hangar member invitations! The previous versions relied on some manual intervention behind the scenes, and now this process is instant and fully automated.

All that’s required is to invite a user with the email or phone number they’ve used (or will use) for their account, and it will send them a message via the chosen method. An invite will show up in their home screen for them to accept (or reject!).

Overall, this version (1.2.2) contains several improvements since the last rollout of 1.1.6 on December 19th:

• Fully automated hangar member invites via email or phone number, and improved member management. As requested, Users can also now Leave a hangar.
• Fixed a “Tap to Locate” bug for the alert annunciator lights on tablet sized screens.
• Miscellaneous dependent package updates and performance improvements.
• Improved automated test coverage.

What’s Most Exciting?

It’s most exciting that now the User Experience of adding a new Hangar Member is no longer a slow process. This was a major frustration of folks with multi-user hangars. Now you can truly easily invite a fellow hangar member or mechanic to your hangar and it is sent near-instantly. Getting the invited person to accept quickly is unfortunately out of our hands.

Common question: can I invite someone who doesn’t have an account? You can! So long as they create an account with that email or phone number they will see an invite when they first log in.

Android Progress

More progress has been made on the last few items needed to release the App onto the public-facing Play Store, including modification of the existing automated test framework to work better with the Android version of BetterPlane.

We also need to create new screenshots of the Android app for the Play Store. Current target is to have Android publicly available by next Friday (January 16th)!

Lastly: Cool Tool (Updated)

One last thing that I want to plug again since it’s been updated with registry data from this week: here’s a neat tool built to examine the light aircraft in the FAA’s registry. Check out the interesting spike in horsepower in 1944! WW2 aircraft effect on the civilian market? Has to be! -> BetterPlane’s Light Aircraft Explorer

If you’d like to chat about BetterPlane, aircraft logbooks, or even just airplanes, feel free to set up some time on my calendar. I’m looking forward to the months and years ahead! If you’re a BetterPlane user, log in and add or vote on your favorite features! Tell your friends!

Calendar: betterplane.youcanbook.me