Answers
The questions a club actually asks
These are the ones that arrive by email. Nothing here requires a demo call, and none of the answers are "it depends on your workflow".
Billing and money
How does a member actually get billed?
Charges accrue as they happen: a flight when it is flown, priced from the meters at that aircraft’s rate, and dues on the club’s cycle. Once a month you generate statements, review every member’s lines on one screen, and approve. Nothing reaches a member until you have seen it.
Do I still need QuickBooks?
No. FlightWay keeps the books: an append-only double-entry ledger with a chart of accounts, balance sheet, profit and loss and A/R aging. Charges, payments, credits, refunds and expenses are all journal entries. That is the difference between this and a sync.
How do members pay, and what does it cost them?
Bank transfer (ACH) or card, from the statement in the app or from a link in the emailed statement that needs no login. ACH is not gated behind enabling cards. The surcharge for each is set by the club and shown to the member before they confirm.
Do you take a percentage of what our members pay?
No. FlightWay is paid by subscription only: no cut of collections, no per-statement fee, no per-payment fee. Payments run through the club’s own Stripe account into the club’s own bank account and never touch ours. Stripe’s own fee is the only one charged, and on a $2,000 statement that is $5 by bank transfer against roughly $58 by card, which is why one debit a month is the default. The arithmetic.
Can we collect automatically?
Yes. An approved batch can be debited on the due day by ACH, as one debit per member covering the whole period. Stripe caps ACH fees per transaction, so one combined debit costs the club far less than a fee per flight.
What about a member who prepays, or buys in?
Prepayments, flight credits and buy-ins are ordinary entries against the member’s account, not special cases. A credit balance shows on the statement and is drawn down by flying.
Can we bill different members at different rates?
Dues follow member class, and billing liability is separate from permission. A maintenance officer can hold a class that is not billed dues, and a student, family or non-flying class can each carry their own dues, without anything being special-cased.
What happens to a charge that was wrong?
It is corrected with a reversing entry, not by editing history. The statement shows the correction and the ledger shows what happened, which is precisely what a treasurer needs when a member queries something six months later.
Flying, scheduling and maintenance
What happens when someone flies on a broken aeroplane?
They cannot book it. A squawk marked critical sets the aircraft unairworthy, which removes it from the schedule and blocks check-out until it is cleared with a corrective action recorded.
Can two people book the same aircraft at the same time?
No. Overlaps are refused by a constraint on the reservation table in the database, not by a check in the form, so two members tapping the same slot on two phones cannot both succeed.
Do you bill on hobbs or tach?
Whichever each aircraft is set to. Both readings are captured on every flight, the rate and basis live on the aircraft, and the charge is calculated rather than typed. The trade-off between the two is set out in our guide on hobbs or tach.
What if a member has no signal at the field?
A flight logged offline is queued on the phone and sent when it reconnects, including on the next app open rather than only on a network event.
Does it track our airworthiness directives?
It carries the FAA AD catalogue, lets the club curate which ADs apply to its serial numbers, and records compliance: how, at what time in service, recurring or terminated, and when next due. It is a tracking aid. The signed logbook entry and the IA’s signature remain the legal record.
Can we see where the aeroplane is?
Yes, for the club’s own registrations, from community ADS-B receiver networks: position, altitude, ground speed and track, with the flown path drawn behind it. Coverage is a volunteer network, so it can drop out, and it is explicitly not for navigation.
Switching, cost and commitment
What does it cost, really?
$69 a month for up to two aircraft, $10 a month for each aircraft after that, 10% off if you pay yearly. SMS notifications are $20 a month if you want them. Every member is included at every size. That is the whole price list, and it is on the pricing page.
How long are we running two systems?
Days, not months, and not blindly. Your existing scheduler stays live during the changeover and we sync it, so a booking made mid-move still shows up. You pick the date the club switches over.
What happens to our QuickBooks history?
Your call. Most clubs start clean and settle outstanding balances in the old system, with members carrying a previous balance line until it clears. If you would rather bring history across properly, we rebuild it as real journal entries and reconcile every balance against your existing A/R aging. That is a separate quote, not part of the free migration.
What if we want to leave?
Month to month, no contract, no minimum. Export the full journal, every entry and every line, plus flights and roster, from inside the app. It is ordinary double-entry data, not a proprietary blob, and we will help you land it somewhere else.
Who is behind this, and what if you disappear?
A fair question to ask a small vendor. FlightWay is operated by Hughes Technology LLC and was built by a club treasurer who had to reconcile this every month. The practical protections are that your data is exportable at any time in a standard shape, and that the books are yours in a format an accountant already understands. More on the about page.
Do you have thousands of users?
No, and we are not going to claim it. FlightWay runs a real club today, including a full year of accounting migrated across and reconciled to the penny before a single member was billed from it. We would rather show you the software and let you judge it.
Ask us something that is not here
One email, a real reply within a day, from someone who has done the reconciliation. No discovery call, no demo gauntlet.
Last updated 18 August 2026.