Aircraft reserved for selected pilots
September 2026 · Schedules & Fleet
An aircraft can now name the pilots allowed to self-book it. A co-owned aeroplane, a machine reserved for renters, a type only a few people are checked out on — open to those pilots, invisible to everyone else, without touching a single pilot profile.
Why we built it
Self-scheduling had two switches: a checkbox that opened an aircraft to self-booking, and a dropdown that capped the user group allowed to use it — all pilots, certified pilots, instructors. Narrowing further meant going the long way round, through each pilot's Aircraft Attributions, where an empty list means every aircraft. Reserving one aeroplane for three people therefore meant editing everybody else in the school, one profile at a time, to tick every aircraft except that one.
Schools reasonably tried the obvious thing instead: unticking self-scheduling on the aircraft. That stops everybody — including the chief pilots the aircraft belongs to, who book through the same Book a Flight widget — so the aircraft had to be left open to the whole school.
How it works
Open Aircraft → edit → Scheduling. Who can self-schedule has a fourth option, Only selected pilots, and a list of your active pilots underneath.
Tick the pilots that may book the aircraft. Only they see it in Book a Flight, and only they can book it.
The list lives on the aircraft and overrides the pilots' Aircraft Attributions for it. Naming a pilot is an explicit authorisation; it is not quietly undone by an attribution list set up years ago.
An empty list means nobody. The reverse of the attributions convention, and deliberately so: the whole point is that the list says who is in, not who is out. The form says so in red when nothing is ticked.
* The list is kept when you switch to another access mode, so an aircraft can be opened to the school for a weekend and closed again without rebuilding it. * Deactivating a pilot takes them out of self-booking without anyone editing the aircraft.
Not only booking
Pair it with All pilots see schedule switched off in Company settings → Schedule and those pilots see only that aircraft's schedule — their aeroplane, their bookings, nothing about the rest of the fleet. Managers keep the full view.
Where you'll see it
The rule is applied when the booking is saved, not only when the aircraft list is drawn, so it is a real restriction rather than a filter: a booking that reaches the server for an aircraft the pilot is not named on is refused with "You are not allowed to self schedule …".
See Self scheduling → Reserving one aircraft for a few pilots for the full reference.
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