Some of you have probably noticed (or maybe not! 
) I’ve been a little scarce around here lately. There’s a reason.
For the last few months I’ve been building Blue Deck, an electronic pilot logbook for Windows.
It started as my own personal logbook. I’d gotten frustrated with some of the options out there and decided to build exactly what I wanted for myself. Somewhere along the way it went from “this is pretty cool” to “other pilots might actually want this,” and I apparently accidentally started a software company.
Blue Deck is built primarily with professional pilots in mind. It does all the normal logbook stuff — flights, aircraft, totals, reports, currency, queries, simulator time, IACRA, etc. — but I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time on the annoying parts: importing old logbooks, finding questionable data, backups, keeping aviation data current, and generally trying to make maintaining a career logbook require as little work as possible.
For the UAL folks, there’s some additional magic. Blue Deck can use and reconcile multiple CCS data sources, which makes keeping it updated pretty painless. But it is absolutely not a UAL-only logbook — the core application is built for pilots generally, with the UAL stuff as an extra layer.
There’s also the Pilot Portal, which lets you publish a secure, read-only copy of your logbook and access it from your phone, tablet, or basically anything with a browser — including offline.
One thing that mattered to me from the beginning: your logbook is yours. Your data lives locally, the desktop license is permanent, and I'm not interested in holding anyone's career history hostage behind a subscription.
Anyway, today was the official launch, which is pretty surreal after staring at this thing for months.
I’m not really posting this here as a sales pitch. A bunch of you have known me for a very long time, and this is basically where I’ve disappeared to. I figured I should finally show you what I’ve been building.
There’s an unlimited-time demo if you want to screw around with it:
Blue Deck: Blue Deck | Digital Logbook for Airline Pilots
Happy to answer questions here, too.
Ian
) I’ve been a little scarce around here lately. There’s a reason.For the last few months I’ve been building Blue Deck, an electronic pilot logbook for Windows.
It started as my own personal logbook. I’d gotten frustrated with some of the options out there and decided to build exactly what I wanted for myself. Somewhere along the way it went from “this is pretty cool” to “other pilots might actually want this,” and I apparently accidentally started a software company.
Blue Deck is built primarily with professional pilots in mind. It does all the normal logbook stuff — flights, aircraft, totals, reports, currency, queries, simulator time, IACRA, etc. — but I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time on the annoying parts: importing old logbooks, finding questionable data, backups, keeping aviation data current, and generally trying to make maintaining a career logbook require as little work as possible.
For the UAL folks, there’s some additional magic. Blue Deck can use and reconcile multiple CCS data sources, which makes keeping it updated pretty painless. But it is absolutely not a UAL-only logbook — the core application is built for pilots generally, with the UAL stuff as an extra layer.
There’s also the Pilot Portal, which lets you publish a secure, read-only copy of your logbook and access it from your phone, tablet, or basically anything with a browser — including offline.
One thing that mattered to me from the beginning: your logbook is yours. Your data lives locally, the desktop license is permanent, and I'm not interested in holding anyone's career history hostage behind a subscription.
Anyway, today was the official launch, which is pretty surreal after staring at this thing for months.
I’m not really posting this here as a sales pitch. A bunch of you have known me for a very long time, and this is basically where I’ve disappeared to. I figured I should finally show you what I’ve been building.
There’s an unlimited-time demo if you want to screw around with it:
Blue Deck: Blue Deck | Digital Logbook for Airline Pilots
Happy to answer questions here, too.
Ian
