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Co-Owning with Coflyte
App Streamlines Aircraft Ownership by Jared Jacobs
The joys of aircraft ownership are numerous: free- dom, flexibility, adventure, spreadsheets...?
If I’m being honest, the amount of time dedi- cated to spreadsheets in the first month of aircraft ownership began to get in the way of the enjoyment. As a co-owner of Bonanza F33A, I found myself in charge of juggling payments of all sorts: hangar and aircraft supplies, chart subscriptions, insurance payments, pre-purchase inspection fees, monthly fixed costs, hourly operating costs, debts owed by each owner (and funds transferred), as well as managing flight reservations.
While entering a co-ownership offers many benefits, it also necessitates tracking a lot more data and moving parts than sole ownership. It was somewhere around the sixth Google Sheet that I was ready to find a better way.
Recognizing a Need
As it turns out, I am not the only one who recognized the inefficiencies of trying to separately manage all of the facets of aircraft ownership. In 2019, Eric Hill, director at the Center of Entrepreneurship at Mississippi State Univer- sity, partnered with two other pilots on a Piper Cherokee. The task of managing the aircraft partnership fell to
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PHOTO COURTESY OF COFLYTE
Eric, who quickly began a search for a software solution that could bring maintenance tracking, scheduling and billing all under one roof. His search came back with no suitable results.
At about the same time, a friend of Eric and fellow Mississippi State alumni, Tal Clark, purchased a 1972 Beechcraft F33A Bonanza (GREAT first airplane, by the way!). Feeling in over his head as a first-time aircraft owner, Tal and Eric began talking about the glaring need for a one-stop-shop aircraft ownership software solution. With backgrounds in entrepreneurship and technology, Eric and Tal were the right men for the job, and in September of 2019, Coflyt was launched.
I was recommended Coflyt by a friend who had man- aged his own aircraft partnership and decided to give it a shot. I signed up for the 30-day free trial to evaluate the software before purchasing a membership ($14 per month or $140 annually for a single-user/$36 per month or $360 for multi-user). I was impressed to find that a member of the Coflyt team could be scheduled for a virtual meeting free of charge to help new users get started. I signed up for a consultation and was scheduled a time with Pace Clark, son of co-founder Tal.