Airlines: software to start with

Airlines is the first piece of software I designed. At the start, I wanted one thing only: planning, all in one, in the same place.

I thought of it as software to start with. When you launch a small airline, you have little means, and you want to put your energy into operations and profitability, not elsewhere. You do not want to pay, on top of everything else, an IT person who comes to install a product — and who, quite often, has never set foot in aviation. I have seen it happen around me. It always ends the same way: tens of thousands of euros gone, months lost, everyone angry, and in the end no programme that really runs.

So I did the opposite. Airlines was designed for small structures, by people who have run an airline and who know what their customer is going through, because they have been through it. Operations, quality, aircraft follow-up, stock, accounting, sales: everything fits in a single workspace. A small airline is all of that at the same time, often with one person wearing three hats before noon.

Is it perfect? No. Nothing is at the beginning, and I would rather say so. But everything becomes so when you take the time to get there, without ruining yourself: you start with what exists, you add what is missing with the person who uses it, and the software grows with the airline. It is exactly what I would have liked to find the day I started. That is why it exists.