What a new FTO needs on the record before inspection

A new flying training organisation needs five things on one record before its pre-approval inspection: every student and their syllabus progression, every flight scheduled and logged, every aircraft and its records, every instructor's availability, and the fees that follow each student. Kept together from the first day, they are ready to be inspected; kept apart, they have to be reconciled under pressure.

Two things this guide does not do. It does not quote the regulator's requirements: which records the inspection asks for, and the wording of each, is being supplied and verified before it is published, and until then it appears on this site as [PLACEHOLDER: requirement wording to be supplied/verified by Sreelal; do not write regulatory text]. And it does not claim the software gets you approved. It describes how an FTO's operating records are kept so that, when the requirements are laid against them, there is one record to point at rather than several to reconcile.

The student record is the spine of everything else. One record per student, opened on enrolment, holding the hours they need to reach, the hours they have flown, and where they stand in the syllabus. Hours are held against the student rather than in a separate logbook, so a student's progress is read off the record instead of counted by hand when someone asks.

That matters before the first sortie flies, because the record is what the schedule is built from. A student who exists only on an enrolment form and in an instructor's memory cannot be scheduled against a free aircraft and a current instructor with any confidence; a student on the record can.

Tomorrow's flying is built by matching a student, an available instructor and a free aircraft into one slot, on one board. The sortie then goes ahead against that booking, so what was planned and what actually flew are the same entry. When it lands, the hours are recorded against the student, the aircraft and the instructor at once, instead of in three books that have to agree later.

This is the difference inspection makes visible. Three books kept separately will drift, and the drift is found on the day someone compares them. One entry that feeds three totals cannot drift, because there is nothing to compare it against but itself.

Every aircraft on the fleet has its own record, with its availability, so a booked aircraft is genuinely free. Instructor availability is held alongside the fleet. Utilisation, how much each aircraft and each instructor actually flew, comes out of the same bookings, so an idle aircraft shows up as a figure rather than a feeling.

In Saiga Aviation this is the ATLAS tier: Aviation, Training, Logistics, Airworthiness, Students. Aircraft records are part of it, with airworthiness tracked from there up, and it is framed as the approval-ready records foundation a new FTO needs before its regulatory pre-approval inspection. What the regulator's own wording asks of those aircraft records is the open item above, not something this page fills in.

Fee tracking is the fourth strand of ATLAS, and it belongs on the student record for the same reason hours do: a balance that is read off the record is a balance nobody has to compute. A student's fees, what has been paid and what is due against the hours flown, sit beside the hours themselves.

This is also the strand new schools most often leave for later, because it feels administrative rather than operational. It is operational. A school that cannot say what each student owes against what each student has flown is carrying a reconciliation it will have to do eventually, and the week before an inspection is the worst week to do it.

An FTO that opens on one record never has to migrate onto it. That is the whole argument for doing this before approval rather than after: the student records, the flying board, the fleet records and the fee ledger are set up empty, and the operation fills them as it runs. Everything the inspection will look at is being produced by the operation itself, not assembled for the inspection.

An FTO that is already flying starts a step up the ladder. SABLE adds instructor rostering and HRMS, fuel and resource logistics, briefing and flight authorisation, and a management dashboard that puts utilisation, money and compliance in one view; VULCAN adds licence and hour tracking, compliance automation and the audit packs that come out of the operation as it runs. The two paths are set out on the Saiga Aviation page.

Ekvi Air, a DGCA-approved flying training organisation at Salem Airport, runs its operation on it. A reference call is available on request; the site publishes no figures or testimonials on their behalf.

Seven things to have on the record, in the order they depend on each other. None of them is a regulatory requirement as written; they are what makes the operation's own records complete.

1. 1.Every student enrolled, with the hours they need to reach and their place in the syllabus.
2. 2.Every aircraft on the fleet record, with its availability and its aircraft records current.
3. 3.Every instructor on the record, with their availability held beside the fleet.
4. 4.The coming week's flying built on the board: student, instructor and aircraft matched per slot.
5. 5.Last month's sorties logged once, against student, aircraft and instructor together, with totals that agree because they come from the same entries.
6. 6.Fee balances current against hours flown, per student.
7. 7.The regulator's requirements laid against each record, using the wording being supplied for the records table on the Saiga Aviation page.