Matt Thurber, editor-in-chief at AIN Media Group, has been flying since 1975 and writing about aviation since 1978 and now has the best job in the world, running editorial operations for Aviation International News, Business Jet Traveler, and FutureFlight.aero. In addition to working as an A&amp;P mechanic on everything from Piper Cubs to turboprops, Matt taught flying at his father’s flight school in Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1980s, flew for an aircraft owner/pilot, and for two summer seasons hunted swordfish near the George’s Banks off the East Coast from a Piper Super Cub. An ATP certificated fixed-wing pilot and CFII and commercial helicopter pilot, Matt is type-rated in the Citation 500 and Gulfstream V/550. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Matt and his team cover the entire aviation scene including business aircraft, helicopters, avionics, safety, manufacturing, charter, fractionals, technology, air transport, advanced air mobility, defense, and other subjects of interest to AIN, BJT, and FutureFlight readers.

Editor-in-Chief

Matt Thurber

Last year, new maintenance tracking provider Traxxall Technologies opened for business. There is no shortage of maintenance tracking companies such as Camp Systems, Flightdocs, SkyBooks and others. Camp claims a significant share of the market, with more than 16,000 aircraft, and is the “factory maintenance tracking provider” for Bombardier, Boeing Business Jets, Daher, Dassault Falcon, Embraer, Honda Aircraft, Piaggio, Pilatus and Textron Aviation. Avtrak exists as a division of Camp Systems, for operators that prefer to do more data entry themselves. Buyers of new aircraft can choose any maintenance-tracking provider, and Traxxall will match the first-year-free deal that typically comes with new aircraft, said CEO Scott Henderson.

 


“People were looking for an alternative provider,” he added. “We called around to a lot of operators and flight departments and heard pretty clearly that they would welcome a new entrant into the market. Some were frustrated with the technology that was out there, and some didn’t want to be overly dependent on one or two providers.”

 


The Traxxall team started by mapping out a detailed product specification. “To their credit, it was really well done, logical, sensible, with a lot of advantages,” Henderson said. “They understood the brief. It took four to five months to code. We didn’t want to launch a me-too business, but wanted something that was new and fresh.”

 


<h2>Customer-selected Reports</h2>

 


Aircraft operators consistently told Traxxall they want to create a variety of custom reports and that the product must integrate with their existing software. “That was an important part of our philosophy,” he said, “to write code so people can use [the product].”

 


Traxxall is building interfaces for popular operations software such as ArincDirect’s Flight Operations System, Professional Flight Management, Seagil’s Bart and others. “It’s relatively easy to get systems talking to each other,” said Mark Steinbeck, Traxxall’s president of U.S. business. And there is no need to build modules in Traxxall that are already available from other software providers.

 


Traxxall was designed for any size flight operation or aircraft, he said. “The people who built it understand flight departments and workflows. Not every operation works the same. An operator with three heavy jets in Florida might operate differently from an operator with the same jets based in Chicago. We had to develop a system that can be adaptable.”

 


One way that Traxxall helps is by providing to the user with the means to build filters that generate a required report. For example, Steinbeck explained, an operator used to generate a report every quarter with all the serialized component changes listed. This involved going through each logbook entry to find each change, making copies, highlighting the component, then typing it into a spreadsheet and sending it to the CFO and the leasing company. “We built a filter, he hits ‘generate report’ and it goes right to the CFO. It saved him two days per quarter.”

 


Traxxall is designed to run on any Web-enabled device. The company uses aircraft manufacturer Chapter 5 maintenance programs to populate customers’ databases, but Traxxall can also update these with the instructions for continued airworthiness that come with modifications and upgrades. Other Traxxall features include a customizable dashboard that lets the user drag and drop widgets such as a calendar with due items and other informational mini screens anywhere on the page. The status report page shows the status of maintenance requirements such as inspections, life-limited components, on-condition parts, ADs, service bulletins and so on. The “holding area” is used to manage the aircraft’s maintenance operations. Traxxall offers digital signature capability compliant with FAA Advisory Circular 120-78. Documents signed in the field are automatically loaded onto Traxxall’s servers for safekeeping, and Traxxall can store historical documents if an operator so desires.

 


“We built something that people can open up and say, ‘This is intuitive,’” said Henderson. “We’re on track to sign more than 150 airplanes this year. There’s real demand out there.”

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