Aircraft maintenance logbooks are essential and required items. Typically, these are physical binders with paperwork organized within. Often, the logbooks are as valuable as the aircraft itself because one is not worth much without the other. Therefore, logbooks must be protected just like we protect our aircraft.
Here at Soulbird, we take many steps to safeguard the physical logbooks to include keeping them in fire-resistant cabinets, in a restricted access room that is fully enclosed in cinder blocks and equipped with a steel door. All pages that have entered the logs once an aircraft is under the care of Soulbird are kept in transparent sheet protectors. We even use spill-proof coffee cups when accessing the logbooks to avoid spills! However, even with those protective measures, we all know that the unknown is a possibility…
The vast majority of our Soulbird Fleet has a digital version of the aircraft logs stored with our partners at Bluetail (https://bluetail.aero/). This system not only acts as a backup allowing us to quickly rebuild the logbooks in the event of a physical disaster, it also allows Soulbird to perform many other value-added actions for our aircraft owners: Logbooks can be viewed electronically and remotely by designee brokers, potential partners/buyers, insurance companies, financial entities, maintenance shops). Logbook research can happen very quickly using the system’s integrated search function. All associated aircraft paperwork such as parts certifications, shipping labels, component inspection results, pictures… anything really, can be stored in an organized and searchable fashion on Bluetail.
Our associated flight school, Oklahoma Aviation, has their entire fleet on Bluetail. The system works so well that we no longer check out logbooks to instructors, students, or examiners. They simply access the logs via a tablet. Bluetail has informed us that we are the only flight school that they know of that has moved to 100% digital records access.
The digital copy of the aircraft records is just one more of the value-added components that sets us at Soulbird apart from other operators.
