Soaring Book

Soaring Book is the software that runs a gliding club, from the office to the launch point. It comes in three parts: a Rails web app for the year-round administration, an iPad app for the flying day out on the airfield, and a smaller iPhone app where pilots look back at their own flights. It's a personal project, built in Ruby on Rails, Objective-C and Swift.

Running the club

The web app is where the club lives the rest of the week. Every flight gets logged there, and every glider carries its own record: hours flown, and the running history of its inspections and repairs. Across a season that data becomes the club's statistics. It plans the winter overhaul too — the off-season stretch when the fleet comes apart for maintenance — and the flying each pilot does turns straight into an invoice, with nobody re-entering anything. It's the unglamorous spine a club actually runs on.

The flying day

On a flying day the iPad takes over, out at the launch point where the gliding actually happens. It begins by pulling the day's data down from the web app — who's flying which gliders, and the club records behind them — and from there it runs the day, logging each launch and landing as it happens. Airfields rarely have reliable signal, so the app was built to need none. Every flight is held locally in Core Data; the whole day works with the network gone and syncs back to the server the moment a connection returns. The completed flights upload at day's end, and the invoices follow from them.

One record, three ways in

Everything points back to a single record of the club's flying, and the iPhone is the last way into it: a small companion a pilot keeps for looking over their own flights, drawn from the same data the office and the field already share. I built Soaring Book because I fly, and a club I'm part of needed it — and it's been running real flying days for years. The real work lived in the seams between the apps, in keeping one set of flights true whether it was logged on the field with no signal or read back later from a desk.