On Nov 28, 10:10*am, Andy wrote:
On Nov 27, 2:09*pm, Dave Springford wrote:



We had a computer system running at our club about 8 years ago, but
have gone back to a paper system with the data entered into the
accounting system at a later time. *The intent of the computer system
was to save the time punching in all the flight data. *As it turns
out, it didn't actually make much difference in time-savings over the
course of a year.

Some of the problems are much as Dave mentions above, such as a power
source at the launch point and computaphobes.

Other problems included:

1. The issue of small mid-week operation not taking the computer to
the launch point to enter the flights (too much effort for just a
couple of flights) and then someone else having to enter all the mid-
week flights before the Saturday morning operation could start.

2. Entering new members into the system at the launch point - the
member database was not easily updated on the fly.

3. Errors entered into the launch point computer are transmitted
directly into the billing system. *If there is no paper trail, these
can be difficult to correct.

With the paper system, one person in a quiet space enters all the data
and checks it for validity before it gets to the billing system.
Granted, this person does a lot of data entry, but we have also found
that they catch 99% of the errors before the numbers hit the billing
system.

Our system (for a club of about 150 members with about 3500 flights
per year) now works like this.

a. *The pilot fills out a flight card before take-off with glider ID,
their name and account #, type of flight and tow height. *(types of
flight include Intro/Famil flight, student flight, solo flight, flight
in private ship etc)

b. *The flight card is passed to the time keeper who enters the flight
on the daily log sheet, assigns a flight number and then adds take-off
and landing time on the card.

c. *The card is a two part carbon form, where one copy goes to the
accounting system and the other goes to the pilot after the flight

d. *The flight info from all cards is entered into our "flight card
processor" (FCP). *This is a program written in Visual Basic with a MS
Access backbone. *This converts the feet and minutes for each flight
into dollars and cents. *It also produces a monthly listing for each
member with all the details for each flight.

e. *At the end of each month the FCP data is entered into the
accounting system (Quickbooks)

f. *Statements are emailed to each member the first week of each month
with a complete listing of all their flight details from the FCP, as
well as all the credits/debits to their account from Quickbooks.

You could consider using digital pen technology with a template that
specifies all the relevant flight info fields to be filled out:

http://www.livescribe.com/

At least then you'd have a paper copy of all the original entries.
You'd need to figure out the OCR part - which in theory would be
easier as you'd know whether each field was alpha or numeric - but
even so it would be a fair amount of coding. *And you'd need to make
sure nobody lost the pen!

Bill mentions integrating with GPS loggers. While interesting I think
it may be overkill for the simple purpose of getting flight times -
unless you had a wireless way of downloading everything from the
aircraft. Even more coding and the wireless technology on loggers
isn't quite available yet.

9B

Wireless tech would make a nifty system but it isn't absolutely
needed. If the GPS loggers recorded on SD cards, just bring them to
the club office for the software to read. You'd still have to
manually log who flew which glider but the altitudes and flight
durations would be perfectly accurate.