Sky Commander.

Client & context

An Austrian emergency service organisation operating a helicopter fleet needed a better way to run its dispatch. Dispatchers and managers were juggling aircraft positions, weather and mission status across separate tools.

The challenge

In emergency aviation, minutes matter and the cost of a mistake is high. The client stressed tracking above everything: everyone in the control room had to see where each aircraft is, what it is doing and what the weather is doing - at the same moment, without refreshing or switching windows. At the same time, managers needed an overview of missions and fleet use, not a dispatcher's level of detail.

What we built

Sky Commander combines the dispatcher's and the manager's view of the fleet in one application:

• Live map - Google Maps API integration with real-time aircraft positions and geo-monitoring.
• Weather layer - weather data shown on the same map the dispatcher works from.
• Missions - creating a mission, assigning an aircraft and crew, and tracking its status from dispatch to completion.
• Messaging between the control room and crews.
• Organisation tools for managers: fleet overview and mission history.

Process & timeline

We started by sitting with the dispatch workflow - what a dispatcher looks at first when a call comes in - and designed the screen around that order. The build ran in two-week sprints with the client testing each release against real dispatch scenarios.

Results

The client described Sky Commander as an ideal solution for both flight dispatchers and top managers: one shared picture of the fleet instead of several tools.

Dispatchers and managers now work from one shared picture of the fleet instead of switching between separate tools for positions, weather and missions.

At our current rates, a build of this scope would cost about £35–65k — an estimate from the feature list, not the original invoice.

If we built it today

Today we would add offline resilience for the control room, an audit log of every dispatch decision, and integrations with flight-tracking and weather APIs through a single map layer, with role-based access for dispatchers, crews and managers. A first release of a product like this typically takes 6–8 weeks; our rates start from £49/hour per developer, and £65–£70/hour for a full team with QA and product ownership. Discovery starts from £3,000.

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