Deadline Improvements for Aircraft

 Right now, you can create a custom deadline and tie it to an aircraft using hours rather than a date.  E.g., “Inspect Brake Pads at 200 hours.”  That would show up in your currency as a black unitless number:

It's black because while I can use the passage of time to gauge how close (or beyond!) you are getting to a date-based deadline, I have no such way to estimate how close the aircraft is getting to an hours-based deadline.  Further, since the hours are unitless, I don't know whether they are hobbs or tach based.

Today, I've I made two changes.

The first is to make hour-based deadlines more sensitive to an estimate of where you are relative to the deadline.  

Deadlines that are tied to an aircraft and which are hours based rather than date based will now find a high-water-mark ending hobbs and/or tach for your flights in that aircraft.  They will figure out which one that exists and is closest to the target.  The idea being that if your tach is, say, at 1,385 but your hobbs is at 4,801, and you set a deadline for 4,800, you probably meant hobbs and not tach.  

The deadline then uses that value (if found) to do green/blue/red like other currency/deadline items.  I’m using red for overdue, blue for getting close (within 10 hours) and green for anything that is more than 10 hours away.  And I show my estimate of where the aircraft currently is:

Of course this is only an estimate: if you share the aircraft and someone else has flown it, or if you neglected to log an updated ending hobbs on your last flight, then the true value is certainly higher.  But it should be a pretty decent estimate, especially if it’s your plane and you are good about reliably logging this.  (Note: if you use the club functionality, you can scan across club user’s flights to find a likely better high water mark).

The second change is to apply this to oil changes, the hours-based deadline for aircraft that is so common that it's built-in to MyFlightbook. 

When you enter the hours that the last oil change was performed, I had been showing that value plus various time intervals to suggest when you might need to next change it.

But I decided that with the enhancement above to deadlines, the simplest way to do this is a custom deadline, and with the enhancement above, it’s easy to add that:

If you click on “Add a deadline using an interval of:”, then it creates the new deadline, associated with the aircraft (and with the default regeneration interval that you selected (in the example image above, it was set for 275 since the last oil change was at 250):

Due to the deadlines enhancement, it will show green/blue/red based on the estimate of airframe hours:

The nice thing about doing it this way is that you can track any AD or similar periodic task in the same manner.