Booking system for gliders

[AndersP]

Hej,

My club is looking for a free, or very low cost, booking system. Does
anyone have any suggestions ? Up until now we used a free service that
suddenly without warning turned non-free :-(. Puts us in a bit of an
awkward position.

We are about 200 users with roughly 15 aircrafts, but the number of
bookings per year is limited to a few tenths. Therefore we feel it is
not worth the big bucks the former free-of-charge system now wants to
charge.

We want something with an easy web-interface so that everyone can use
it, including old farts ;-).

Yet it should be advanced enough to allow the sort of things you need to
do in a glider club w.r.t. a/c booking. Like blocking a/c for service,
allowing reservation of instructors, marking a/c as grounded due to
problems etc.

Suggestions ?

/Anders Pettersson

PS. Mail address is bogus to prevent spam, reply in this group please. DS.

[Dan G]

AndersP wrote:
> Hej,
>
> My club is looking for a free, or very low cost, booking system. Does
> anyone have any suggestions ? Up until now we used a free service that
> suddenly without warning turned non-free :-(. Puts us in a bit of an
> awkward position.
>
> We are about 200 users with roughly 15 aircrafts, but the number of
> bookings per year is limited to a few tenths. Therefore we feel it is
> not worth the big bucks the former free-of-charge system now wants to
> charge.
>
> We want something with an easy web-interface so that everyone can use
> it, including old farts ;-).
>
> Yet it should be advanced enough to allow the sort of things you need to
> do in a glider club w.r.t. a/c booking. Like blocking a/c for service,
> allowing reservation of instructors, marking a/c as grounded due to
> problems etc.
>
> Suggestions ?

We use Google Calendars. Create an Google account then distribute the
username and pwd to everyone to share (Google doesn't seem to mind
lots of people being signed in at one from different places!)

Then people can create bookings as "events", e.g our MG is offline at
the moment so that's one event spanning a couple of weeks, a few
people are booked in for flying next week so have added their name as
an "event" on days next week etc. Simple but works!


Dan

[Michael Henry[_2_]]

> My club is looking for a free, or very low cost, booking system.
>
> We want something with an easy web-interface so that everyone can use
> it, including old farts ;-).
>
> Suggestions ?

What you're looking for is very simple from a programming point-of-view.
This is the sort of thing you could take to a computer science student
at the local university and ask him to implement it for a few grains of
rice. That might be more than you're willing to offer though so there
are several projects I have been able to find online:

http://www.shezhu.org/
http://jroger.nuxit.net/openbookings/
http://bumblebeeman.sourceforge.net/
http://rapla.sourceforge.net/

[AndersP]

Michael Henry wrote:
>> My club is looking for a free, or very low cost, booking system.
>>
>> We want something with an easy web-interface so that everyone can use
>> it, including old farts ;-).
>>
>> Suggestions ?
>
> What you're looking for is very simple from a programming point-of-view.
> This is the sort of thing you could take to a computer science student
> at the local university and ask him to implement it for a few grains of
> rice. That might be more than you're willing to offer though so there

:-)

> are several projects I have been able to find online:
>
> http://www.shezhu.org/
> http://jroger.nuxit.net/openbookings/
> http://bumblebeeman.sourceforge.net/
> http://rapla.sourceforge.net/

Thanks, I'll look through the projects. I was scanning sourceforge
before e-mailing here. But there were so many and most targeted hotel
bookings and such. After looking through the options I'm beginning to
realize that Apache, PHP and MySQL are key ingredients for most systems.

I gotta check what the clubs ISP can offer.

Cheers,
Anders

[[email protected]]

My club set up a group on Yahoo. It comes with a calendar that
everyone signed up to the group can use. It's not sophisticated but
it allows you to schedule any time block you want. There are also
added features and best of all it's Free......

Doug

[[email protected]]

We use Schedule Master. Works very well for us. www.schedulemaster.com

[5Z]

I've written something in perl CGI that might work for you. The
database is just a plain text file.

Here are a couple of screen shots:
http://serkowski.com/images/BFSScalendarMonth.JPG
http://serkowski.com/images/BFSScalendarDay.JPG

-Tom

[[email protected]]

On Mar 15, 3:12*pm, AndersP > wrote:
> Hej,
>
> My club is looking for a free, or very low cost, booking system. Does
> anyone have any suggestions ? Up until now we used a free service that
> suddenly without warning turned non-free :-(. Puts us in a bit of an
> awkward position.
>
> We are about 200 users with roughly 15 aircrafts, but the number of
> bookings per year is limited to a few tenths. Therefore we feel it is
> not worth the big bucks the former free-of-charge system now wants to
> charge.
>
> We want something with an easy web-interface so that everyone can use
> it, including old farts ;-).
>
> Yet it should be advanced enough to allow the sort of things you need to
> do in a glider club w.r.t. a/c booking. Like blocking a/c for service,
> allowing reservation of instructors, marking a/c as grounded due to
> problems etc.
>
> Suggestions ?
>
> /Anders Pettersson
>
> PS. Mail address is bogus to prevent spam, reply in this group please. DS.

Anders;

I have had good results for two years with this very simple, free
site:

Pilotschedule.com

Works for tow pilots, instructors, and rentals

aerodyne

[Tony Verhulst]

wrote:
> We use Schedule Master. Works very well for us. www.schedulemaster.com

Also see https://www.aircraftclubs.com . I use it for the Cessna182 that
I have a share in. Reasonably priced and effective. They also have phone
access if you happen to be away from a computer.

Tony V.

[AndersP]

>
> Anders;
>
> I have had good results for two years with this very simple, free
> site:
>
> Pilotschedule.com
>
> Works for tow pilots, instructors, and rentals
>
> aerodyne

Now we're talking! This is something in the right direction :-).

/AndersP

[AA[_2_]]

On Mar 15, 4:12 pm, AndersP > wrote:
> Hej,
>
> My club is looking for a free, or very low cost, booking system. Does
> anyone have any suggestions ? Up until now we used a free service that
> suddenly without warning turned non-free :-(. Puts us in a bit of an
> awkward position.
>
> We are about 200 users with roughly 15 aircrafts, but the number of
> bookings per year is limited to a few tenths. Therefore we feel it is
> not worth the big bucks the former free-of-charge system now wants to
> charge.
>
> We want something with an easy web-interface so that everyone can use
> it, including old farts ;-).
>
> Yet it should be advanced enough to allow the sort of things you need to
> do in a glider club w.r.t. a/c booking. Like blocking a/c for service,
> allowing reservation of instructors, marking a/c as grounded due to
> problems etc.
>
> Suggestions ?
>
> /Anders Pettersson
>
> PS. Mail address is bogus to prevent spam, reply in this group please. DS.

I built an easy to use scheduling tool for our club. Members can
schedule gliders and instructors. Tow pilots and Instructors can
schedule themselves. We also have requirements for an "operations
director" who can schedule themselves. Some other features handy for a
club. Simple security and remotely manageable. If you are
interested, I can set up a demo.

AA