Electronic "Can" for Aircraft (Recording and Transmitting Hobbs and Squawks)

[ShyFlyGuy]

Electronic "Can" for Aircraft (Recording and Transmitting Hobbs and Squawks)

I'll just tell you what I'm looking for, and if you've ever seen or used one, I would love to hear from you.

I've got a few airplanes I lease/rent out. We keep track of the hobbs and tach on a sheet of paper in the "can". I have someone go out there once a week and fetch it, but it never has the tach on it, and the squawks take a while to get back to me so I can fix them. I would love to have a PDA or Blackberry or something of the sort to be in each aircraft. At the end of each flight, the "renter" puts enters his/her name, hobbs, tach, and any squawks, then hits "send", and *poof*, I get an e-mail... or something.

I have heard of this being used on a fractional sail-boat operation, but never in aviation. If anyone has any ideas or has actually seen them being used like this, I would love to hear from you. Please.

Thanks in advance,

Shy

 

[CFIse]

ATP Inc. uses (or at least used to use) text pagers to send in at least the Hobbs and Tach information, and for all I know a bunch of other stuff. In their implementation it wasn't trivial to use, so just any old Joe isn't going to be able to use it.

I'm sure you could do something MUCH more sophisticated with a Blackberry, it's just replacing them every few days as they got stolen might become a bit of pain.

So - no - I don't know of a specific solution, but there might be some quicker options you could develop yourself (the ATP Inc. pagers were wired to the plane to prevent them from walking).