How AutoBrief works
AutoBrief is a pre-flight GO/NO-GO brain for small Part 61 and Part 141 flight schools. It checks every flight against the regs before the wheels turn — and it does it on top of the scheduler you already use, not instead of it.
The gap it catches
A busy dispatcher juggles the schedule, the phone, and the front desk. The thing that slips isn't the schedule — it's the quiet stuff that makes a flight legal:
- Pilot medical class + expiry (14 CFR 61.23)
- Flight review currency (14 CFR 61.56)
- Day / night / IFR currency (14 CFR 61.57)
- Endorsements for the aircraft — complex, high-performance, tailwheel (14 CFR 61.31)
- Aircraft annual + 100-hour inspection countdowns (14 CFR 91.409)
- Open squawks and insurance status
Miss one and a flight launches that shouldn't have. AutoBrief checks all of them in the time it takes to read a tail number.
Layer on top — not rip-and-replace
You've already got a scheduler — Flight Schedule Pro, Schedule Pointe, or Flight Circle — and your school runs on it. AutoBrief doesn't ask you to throw that out. It sits alongside, reads the same facts about your pilots and aircraft, and adds the one thing a scheduler doesn't do: tell you whether a given flight is legal, right now, with the reasons spelled out.
No migration. No data export weekend. No retraining the front desk on a whole new system. That's the difference between layering and replacing — and it's why a small school can be live in an afternoon.
How your roster gets in (the honest version)
“Layered on top” is the direction. Here's exactly where it stands so there are no surprises in onboarding:
1. Today — manual entry
Type your pilots and aircraft in once during setup, or import them from a CSV. The whole engine works on day one with zero integration.
2. Next — CSV from your scheduler
Export your roster from FSP / SP / FC and drop the file in. Same data, less typing.
3. Then — direct scheduler API
A live read of your roster and the day's bookings, so the morning roll-call builds itself.
The engine is the moat — not the AI
The GO/NO-GO verdict is computed by a deterministic rules engine — pure code encoding the regs, backed by a large unit-test suite. Same inputs, same answer, every time. The AI brief is a separate layer that translates that verdict into two or three plain-English sentences. The model never makes the legal call.
That's the trust story: a chief pilot can hold AutoBrief's output next to the FAR and verify it in five minutes. A black box that “uses AI to decide” can't make that promise.
Every override is on the record
When a NO-GO needs to launch anyway, the chief pilot signs off with a typed signature and a reason — and that override is logged, permanently. Six months later, when an insurance carrier or the FAA asks how a decision got made, the answer is one click away. The audit trail is the value, not just a feature.
See for yourself
Runs in your browser — no signup, nothing paid. By TarmacLabs.
See it in 30 seconds
A real GO/NO-GO check, right now — no signup, no scheduler needed.
Demo — scripted scenario
What AutoBrief is not
Flight risk assessment tools (FRAT) are everywhere — most schedulers and safety platforms now include a FRAT score based on weather, pilot rest, and flight duration. AutoBrief is not a FRAT. A FRAT score is a number. AutoBrief is a compliance check with reasons.
No FRAT tool checks whether the pilot's medical has expired, whether the aircraft's 100-hour is overdue, or whether the pilot holds the right endorsement for the specific aircraft type. Those are hard FAA rules with a pass/fail answer — not weighting factors in a risk model. AutoBrief checks them all, cites the regulation, and requires a signed chief-pilot override before a blocked flight can launch.
The override log is the thing your insurance carrier will ask for at renewal. No FRAT tool produces a signed, timestamped, permanently-queryable record of which chief pilot authorized a specific exception on a specific flight and why. That audit trail is the compliance moat.
Why the economics work even at a small school
Small Part 61 schools can schedule and dispatch for free. AutoBrief is not competing against your scheduler's annual contract — it's competing against the cost of the first incident where a pilot flew on credentials you didn't check.
The liability exposure from one flight on an expired medical — let alone an expired insurance policy — dwarfs years of AutoBrief subscriptions. The math is not about software budgets. It's about whether you want a defensible audit trail before the FAA or an insurance carrier asks for one.