Choosing club management software for a gliding club
We make one of the options on this page, so read it with that in mind. What follows is written to be useful to a committee that has not decided anything yet, including the cases where the honest answer is that you should not buy software at all.
There is no comparison table of competitors' prices here, deliberately. Those decay within months, they are usually wrong about what the other product does now, and a vendor's summary of a rival is worth roughly nothing. What we can usefully give you is the shape of the market and the questions that actually separate the options.
Why gliding is genuinely a different problem
This is the thing to understand before you look at anything, because it explains why so many products almost fit.
Most "flying club software" is built for powered flying clubs. That world's core problem is: members book an aircraft for a block of time, fly it, and get billed for Hobbs hours. Booking, scheduling and billing against aircraft time. Several products do that well.
A gliding club's day does not look like that:
- Launches, not bookings. The unit of activity is a launch, logged at a dispatch desk as it happens, often dozens in a day.
- Two aircraft per flight. A tow charge and a glider charge, to potentially two different member accounts.
- Tow rates by release altitude, or a winch rate, or both — not an hourly rate.
- Volunteers run the day. Duty rosters for instructors, tow pilots and ground crew are operationally essential, not a nicety.
- Instructors track student progress, currency and checkouts across many members and many years.
- Everyone is a member, not a customer. Dues, volunteer credit and flying charges land on the same account.
A product built for a powered club can usually be bent into shape for some of this. Whether that bending is acceptable is the actual decision in front of you, and it depends far more on how you run your day than on any feature list.
The four options, honestly
1. Spreadsheets and paper
What most clubs use, and for a genuine share of them it is the right answer. It costs nothing, everyone can already use it, and it bends to any process.
It works until the knowledge lives in one person's head, the monthly invoice run takes a weekend, or the club cannot answer questions like "which students have not flown in two months" without an afternoon of work. Those are the symptoms worth watching for — not club size.
2. General flying club software
Booking, scheduling, billing and member management for flying clubs, built primarily for powered aviation. Aviatize, FlyClub and SkyManager are examples in this category. These are real products with real customers, and they are usually more polished at booking and payments than anything gliding-specific.
The question to ask is what happens to a flying day. Can it log forty launches at a dispatch desk? Can it charge a tow by release height and a glider by the hour, to two different accounts? Does it know what a duty roster is? For some clubs the answer is close enough. For others it is the whole job.
3. Gliding-specific software
Products built around launches, duty rosters and instruction. Vereinsflieger is the established option in the German-speaking world and covers gliders directly; various national associations and individual clubs have their own systems, some of which are shared. GliderOps is in this category.
The trade-off is usually maturity and support. This is a small market, so these products are built by small teams — which means the person who answers your email generally understands your problem, and also that there is less company behind it. Ask directly about that; a straight answer is a good sign.
4. Something a member wrote
More common than people admit, and sometimes excellent — it fits perfectly because it was built for exactly your club.
The risk is the obvious one, and it is the same risk as the indispensable volunteer generally: what happens when they stop? If your club runs on software one member maintains, that belongs on the committee's risk list next to the tow pilot shortage, and it deserves the same succession conversation.
When you should not buy anything
A committee that reads this and buys nothing has still got value from it. Genuine cases where the answer is no, or not yet:
- You fly a dozen weekends a year with fifteen members and one glider. A well-kept spreadsheet is genuinely enough, and the subscription is better spent on the airframe fund.
- Nobody has time to run the migration. Any system needs somebody to load the roster, the rates and the fleet, and to insist on it being used. With no owner, new software becomes a second place where records are incomplete.
- The real problem is a process problem. If flights are not being recorded at all, software does not fix that. A club that will not fill in a paper sheet will not fill in a form either.
- You are mid-crisis. Changing systems during a treasurer handover or a bad financial year adds risk when you have least capacity to absorb it. Do the handover, then change the system.
Questions worth asking any vendor, including us
- Can we export everything, ourselves, without asking you? Members, flights, billing history. If the answer is anything other than a plain yes, that is the answer to several other questions too.
- What happens to our data if you stop trading? Small-vendor risk is real and worth naming out loud.
- Show us a flying day. Not a feature list — a busy Saturday being dispatched. If a demo cannot show that, it may not do it.
- Who does the migration, and what does it cost? Ask specifically about a messy spreadsheet, because that is what you have.
- Who answers when something breaks on a Saturday?
- What does it cost in year three? Including if the club grows.
- Which clubs like ours use it, and can we ring one? The single most informative question on this list, and the one vendors most dislike.
- How does a committee handover work? Roles should transfer by changing a permission, not by handing over a laptop.
Trial it through a real flying day, not a demo. Software looks fine in a quiet room. The test is a busy Saturday with a queue at the launch point, one glider unserviceable and a visitor who wants a trial flight. That is why our own trial runs 60 days and starts with your data in it — a fortnight and an empty database proves nothing either way.
Where we are the wrong answer
Stated plainly, because you will find out anyway:
- You are a powered flying club that also happens to have a glider. The products in category two are built for you and we are not.
- You want to sell trial flights online with card payments as your main need. That is an e-commerce problem, and there are better tools for it.
- You need a full club website with news, galleries and public pages. We do club operations, not publishing — put the website on something like Squarespace and let it be somebody else's problem.
- You want an app in an app store. It runs in a browser on a phone, which we think is right for a shared club tablet, but if a native app is a requirement then we do not meet it.
- You are very small and coping fine. See above.
The short version
- Most "flying club software" is built for powered clubs. Gliding's day is launches, two aircraft, tow rates by height and a duty roster.
- Four options: spreadsheets, general flying club software, gliding-specific, or something a member wrote. All four are legitimate.
- Watch for symptoms, not club size: one person holding it all, invoicing eating a weekend, questions you cannot answer.
- Ask about export, about what happens if the vendor folds, and to ring a club like yours.
- Trial through a real flying day. A quiet-room demo proves nothing.
- If you are small and coping, spend the money on the airframe fund.