Building Open Aviation Solutions

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 21:03:45 +0000

For the past couple of years, while working towards my pilot licence, I’ve looked for fun and interesting ways to use my open source software engineering skills and experience, in an aviation context.

More recently I’ve focussed that effort on Open Aviation Solutions - a small company building and maintaining a collection of aviation-specific Open Source projects.

Two of the taster projects are ones that are immediately useful to me personally but hopefully for other pilots working towards their instructor rating or otherwise needing to present aviation concepts as theory briefings. You can read about each project at:

Open Aviation Components - interactive learning components that bring otherwise static training diagrams to life, embeddable in any website or web-based briefing or slide deck; and utilising the components in:
Open Aviation Briefings - a shared set of Australian RPL briefing presentations that instructors and schools can use for free and adapt to their own needs.

In a way, these two projects are a demonstration to the aviation community how Open Source licensing can benefit both the community and the wider industry. And they help lead in to the main purpose of Open Aviation Solutions as an aviation-specific software consultancy, which is where the third and main project comes in:

Open Aviation Software - think open-source building blocks for aviation software.

Almost every piece of aviation software - from digital logbooks, currency trackers through to flight planners - needs the same plumbing underneath. I’m creating a set of open-source libraries to provide those building blocks, with a standards-based core (using ICAO’s international vocabulary) and country-specific layers on top, starting with an Australian one built on CASA’s regulations.

The idea is that anyone building an aviation product can start from correct, regulation-aware foundations and spend their effort on what makes their app different. They’re still in development - I want to show some examples of what I can do with them first - but when they’re ready they’ll be free and open-source. You can read more on the Open Aviation Software page.

Open-Source | Live and let Learn

Building Open Aviation Solutions