The FAA completed validation flights last month for DayJet’s fleet of 12 Eclipse 500s, bringing the company one step closer to launching the first fully digital operation. The company has designed an operating system–affectionately known as “Hal”–that manages its day-to-day operations and all requirements for the Part 135 certificate. The system–which has four million lines of code and was written over a period of four years by 30 full-time programmers–eliminates the need for paper documents and manual logs and, most important, human intervention.
“Everything that’s done by hundreds and hundreds of people inside an airline or an air carrier is done by computer,” DayJet president and CEO Ed Iacobucci told AIN, explaining that the system manages everything from making reservations to filing the flight plan and transmitting the information to pilots via their electronic flight bag (EFB). “It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s really a quantum leap when you integrate it all.”
