Executive Summary
Across two roundtable discussions at Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit (CALS) East, moderated by AIN’s Matt Thurber, corporate flight department leaders compared notes on how they debrief after a flight, and where the process still falls short. Participants ranged from single-pilot Part 91 operations to large flight departments running multiple Gulfstreams and Bombardiers, and their comments have been anonymized by role only. Three themes ran through both sessions: the persistent gap in software built specifically for post-flight debriefing, as opposed to pre-flight planning; the deliberate work departments are doing to build a blame-free debriefing culture; and a push to widen debriefs beyond stick-and-rudder performance to cover maintenance, fueling, and FBO service.
The Software Gap: Nothing Built for Post-flight Yet
Nearly every participant in both sessions named a different tool, and nearly all of them agreed on the same complaint: pre-flight planning software has matured quickly, but nothing on the market handles post-flight debriefing well. One director of aviation described using a flight-data tool to score every landing and approach, generating a detailed report before the crew even leaves the airport, but acknowledged that the tool was built for training analysis, not for capturing a crew’s own narrative of the flight. Others described stitching together separate systems: a scheduling platform for the data, a messaging app for real-time flags, a notes app or shared document for the trip captain’s written debrief, and a weekly team meeting to surface anything that fell through the cracks.
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