Student endorsement tracking for flight instructors

The idea

An independent CFI teaching eight students across three airports tracks endorsements the way it was done in 1975: ink in the student’s paper logbook and memory in the instructor’s head. A 90-day solo endorsement that quietly expired grounds the student on a perfect flying morning, embarrasses the instructor, and in the worst case becomes an FAA conversation about who let a student fly on lapsed paperwork. The instructor’s certificate is what is on the line.

Flight-school management software serves schools with fleets and front desks, not the freelance CFI, who is the fastest-growing corner of flight training. The checkride-readiness checklist doubles the value: knowing precisely which FAR 61 requirements a student still lacks is currently an evening with a calculator and the student’s logbook.

Who pays

The CFI pays $15/month personally, cheap against an hourly rate of $60 to $90 and the professional exposure of an expiry miss. Buyers are independent instructors and small flying-club CFIs, reached through CFI Facebook groups, r/flying (a huge and active community), aviation podcasts, and DPE-adjacent content, since examiners see incomplete applicants constantly and happily point at tools that fix it.

MVP scope

• Student roster with medical, knowledge test, and endorsement expiry dashboard
• AC 61-65 endorsement template library with exact wording and FAR references
• Auto-computed expiries using FAA calendar-month conventions with 14-day warnings
• Checkride readiness checklist per certificate showing missing requirements
• Skip for v1: logbook hour syncing, scheduling, billing students, school multi-CFI accounts, and digital signature capture

Build EndorseTrack, a student and endorsement tracker for independent flight instructors. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (Postgres, auth), Stripe for subscriptions.

Core flow: a CFI adds students (name, certificate sought, medical class and date, knowledge test date if taken). The endorsement library ships with templates for the standard AC 61-65 endorsements: pre-solo aeronautical knowledge, 90-day solo, solo cross-country, knowledge test, practical test, flight review, and others, each with its FAR reference and the exact required wording. Issuing an endorsement to a student records date, aircraft make/model where applicable, and auto-computes the expiry (90-day solos, 24-calendar-month knowledge test validity, medical expiries by class and age). The dashboard shows every student with colour-coded expiry status and a 14-day-warning list, so a student never shows up to solo on a lapsed endorsement.

The second pillar is checkride readiness: per certificate (private, instrument, commercial), a requirements checklist derived from the relevant FAR 61 subpart (hours categories, dual received, cross-country specifics, night, instrument time), where the CFI ticks or enters totals and the app shows exactly what is missing before a checkride can happen.

Pages: student roster with expiry dashboard, student detail with endorsement history, endorsement issue flow with wording preview, checkride readiness checklist, settings, billing.

Non-obvious detail: expiry math uses calendar months per FAA convention (to the last day of the month), not day counts, and this must be correct.

Pricing: $15/month, unlimited students, 30-day trial.