Some mornings, Gilles Heinesch’s alarm rings at 4am. By midday, the 24-year-old has completed an early shift as a first officer at Luxair. A second working day can then begin: developing software, responding to users and resolving bugs for Pilotflows.

His co-founder, Ted Staggs, 23, is also a first officer at Luxair. Their schedules in the cockpit have become part of the way the company operates: Heinesch tends to work on the platform after an early shift, while Staggs is more likely to continue later in the day.

For now, everything passes through the two founders: coding, product development, marketing and customer support. “We use as much of our free time as possible to build Pilotflows,” he says.

From teenage pilots to co-founders

The two friends’ shared history began long before Pilotflows. They met through aviation as teenagers, when Heinesch was 16 and Staggs was 15, and both were beginning their private pilot training with the ambition of becoming commercial pilots.

Their friendship grew alongside their aviation careers, as did the idea of one day building something together. “I wanted to do something with Ted because I knew that he was committed, and I think he knew that I was committed,” says Heinesch.  “We were both working in aviation, so we thought about many different ideas. We just did not know what the right one was.”

The answer emerged during their training. While learning to fly, they found themselves relying on software that appeared to belong to another technological era.  Some flight schools continue to manage parts of their operations through old software, spreadsheets, paper records and disconnected online tools. “If you remember Windows XP, some of the systems still look a little like that,” he says.

What surprised them was not only the age of the software, but the number of different tools required to complete related tasks. “You had so many different websites and products to use to get one result,” says Heinesch. “We wanted one product with a centralised system.”

A simple tool that kept growing

Pilotflows did not begin as the broad platform it is today. In early 2024, Staggs started developing a basic tool to help pilots complete a routine pre-flight calculation. “It was more like a test project,” says Heinesch. “There is nothing to compare between that and what we have today.”

The founders soon realised that, rather than solving one isolated problem, they could create a connected platform covering several parts of aviation. They drew on their own experience and spoke to friends training in Germany, Spain and Portugal about the systems they used and what they believed was missing.

Staggs’ experience as a skydiver opened up another network, allowing the founders to gather feedback from parachutists and drop-zone operators. “We spoke to people about the products they were using, what annoyed them and what could be better,” says Heinesch. 

Pilotflows gradually expanded into five connected products: digital logbooks for pilots and skydivers, an aircraft-management system, a platform for flight schools and software for skydiving drop zones. While competitors exist in each category, Heinesch says the difference lies in bringing them together. “We found competitors for every individual product, but not a solution that brought them together.”

More than a digital notebook

For individual pilots, the logbook is the main entry point into the platform. Pilots must keep a record of their flying activity, including their flight hours, the aircraft they have operated and their take-offs and landings. These records may be checked during recurrent assessments. Paper logbooks remain familiar, but they are also vulnerable. “You have it in your bag, you spill coffee on it or something happens to it,” says Heinesch.

Pilotflows allows flights to be entered through its mobile application, including when the user is offline. That matters in aviation, Heinesch explains, because pilots may record information while they are in an aircraft without an internet connection.

For flight schools, the business platform also covers areas such as students, instructors, training programmes and aircraft. Drop zones have a separate module for organising their activities.

Keeping these different uses within a single platform created one of the founders’ biggest technical challenges. A pilot recording a flight should not face the same interface as a flight-school manager. “It was difficult to make it user-friendly for every user, whether a private or business user,” says Heinesch.

Coding their own solution

The two founders built Pilotflows themselves. Heinesch began coding at around 14 and had already created websites and digital tools for earlier projects. Staggs started learning shortly before the pair began developing the platform.

Pilotflows is their first large-scale project together, and its scope has forced them to learn while building. One early mistake was creating features before establishing whether users really needed them. “We programmed so many things that we changed afterwards or removed based on user feedback,” says Heinesch.

Artificial intelligence has accelerated parts of the development, although the founders still review and correct the code it produces. “AI is doing a big part of the coding now, but it still makes a lot of mistakes,” says Heinesch. “Without it, this project could have taken five years to build.” 

For now, the founders have stopped adding features to focus on improving the reliability of those already available. “On paper, it is fully operational, but, of course, there are bugs,” says Heinesch. Their aim is to stabilise the platform further by the end of 2026.

The first 200 pilots

Since opening its pilot logbook to the public in February 2026, Pilotflows has registered more than 200 pilots, with users in Luxembourg and as far away as Australia. With little money available for advertising, the founders contacted pilots directly through LinkedIn and relied on search-engine visibility and their own aviation networks.

Pilotflows offers a free version of its logbook for pilots with up to 150 recorded flight hours. The founders chose that threshold because it marks an important stage on the path towards becoming a commercial pilot, after which users can move to a paid subscription. Heinesch estimated that around a quarter of registered users were paying for the platform.

Each new user still feels significant to the founders. “You are really proud to see your software being used in people’s daily lives,” says Heinesch. During the first months, their priority was not to maximise revenue but to attract enough users to identify bugs and determine which functions were genuinely useful.

Convincing schools to move

Individual pilots can download an application and begin testing it within minutes. Winning over a flight school is a more complex task. Changing operational software can require data migration and a shift away from processes that, although outdated, remain familiar. Several flight schools are testing Pilotflows, but the founders have not yet achieved the same level of adoption among businesses as among individual pilots.

Heinesch expects sales and marketing to become one of the company’s most difficult challenges. Existing aviation-software companies have established brands, long-standing customer relationships and considerably larger advertising budgets. “Everywhere you go, you see the biggest brands for pilot logbooks and flight-school software,” he says. “We have to outbid them, and that is quite expensive.”

The task is further complicated by the platform’s different target groups, from individual pilots to flight schools and drop-zone operators.

The founders know that they may eventually need to recruit in areas such as marketing and customer service. For now, a user reporting a problem is likely to receive an answer directly from one of them. “That is the nice thing about a startup like this: you do a bit of everything,” says Heinesch.

A company built around the cockpit

Asked where Pilotflows could be in five years, Heinesch ventures a target of 100,000 pilots and skydivers and around 150 flight schools. Those figures remain far removed from its current scale, but the founders say they have never seriously doubted that the problem they identified was worth addressing. “We know from so many people that there is a lack of software like this in the industry, so we are very confident,” he says.

Heinesch does not identify a single major setback in Pilotflows’ development so far. The most tangible constraint has been time. Some weeks allow the founders to make considerable progress; during others, their flying schedules take priority. “You want to spend more time on Pilotflows, but sometimes it is simply not possible because of work,” says Heinesch.

Even if the company grows, neither founder currently imagines leaving aviation altogether.  “I have always wanted to be a pilot, and I still want to fly because that is what I am passionate about. It is the same for Ted.”

Pilotflows is not intended as an escape from aviation. It is an attempt by two pilots to modernise some of the tools used within it, using the hours outside the cockpit to build the software they wish they had encountered when they first began flying.