Maintenance Digest

Overview

The Maintenance Digest is a scheduled email that tells the people responsible for an aircraft how it is doing: which maintenance items are overdue or coming due, the current tach reading and how fast it is climbing, which squawks are open, and when the aircraft is next blocked for maintenance. One email per aircraft, sent on a weekday your club picks, every week, every month, or every quarter.

It exists because maintenance status is easy to lose track of when nobody is looking at the Maintenance page. The club's maintenance officer, the mechanic who is also a member, the owner-partner who tracks the annual — these are the people who should know that the 100-hour is twelve hours away without having to remember to check. The digest puts that information in their inbox on a predictable day.

The digest is built from the same data as the per-aircraft Maintenance Report, so what the email says and what the report shows always agree.

Required Role

You must have the Account Owner role to set the digest schedule or send a preview.

Who Receives It

The digest is not sent to every member. For each aircraft, it goes to the members listed as that aircraft's contacts — the Contacts section of the Edit Aircraft dialog under Setup → Aircraft (see Adding and Managing Aircraft). A member has to be a contact for the aircraft to receive its digest, and each contact only receives digests for the aircraft they are listed on.

A few details:

• External contacts are never emailed. A mechanic or shop added as an external contact appears on the aircraft for members to call, but the digest goes only to club members.
• Email must be on. A member who has turned off email notifications on their Profile → Notifications tab receives no digest.
• Contacts can mute it per aircraft. On Profile → Notifications → Aircraft Alerts, a contact sees a Maintenance Digest toggle for each aircraft they are listed on and can switch it off for that aircraft. Members who are not a contact for any aircraft do not see the column at all, because there is nothing for them to receive. See Notification Preferences.
• Locked-out members still receive it. A member locked out for non-payment who is still listed as a contact continues to get the digest; being locked out does not change who is responsible for an airplane.

If an aircraft has no member contacts, it is simply skipped. Nothing goes out and nothing is logged as an error, so if a digest you expected never arrives, check the aircraft's contacts first.

Setting the Schedule

1. Click Setup in the navigation bar, then select the Data & Features tab.
2. Find the Maintenance Digest card.
3. Under Send on, choose a weekday, or Off to disable the digest for your club.
4. Under How often, choose one of:
   • Every week — every occurrence of the chosen weekday.
   • Monthly (first week of the month) — the first occurrence of the chosen weekday each month. "First Monday of each month" means the Monday that falls on the 1st through the 7th.
   • Quarterly (first week of Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct) — the first occurrence of the chosen weekday in January, April, July, and October.
5. Click Save.

The line beneath the selectors restates the schedule in plain words ("Every Monday", "First Monday of each month") so you can confirm it before saving.

The weekday is evaluated in your club's timezone, set on the same Data & Features tab. The email itself is sent around 10am Eastern, which is morning in every US timezone.

New clubs start with the digest set to every Monday. Clubs that existed before the feature was introduced start with it off, so turning it on is a deliberate choice.

What the Email Contains

Each digest covers one aircraft. The subject line summarizes what needs attention, for example Maintenance digest: N12345 — 1 overdue · 2 due soon · 1 grounding squawk, or … — all items OK when nothing does. The body contains:

• Summary tiles — counts of overdue items, items due within 30 days, open squawks (with grounding squawks called out), and maintenance blocks in the next 30 days.
• Tach — the aircraft's current tach reading, the date of the last flight log that recorded one, and the average daily usage calculated nightly from the last 60 days of flight logs.
• Maintenance items — every maintenance schedule for the aircraft, sorted by anticipated due date, with its status (Overdue, Due soon, OK). Tach-based items show a projected date marked with ~, computed from the hours remaining and the average daily usage.
• Open squawks — grounding squawks first, then the rest, each with its report date and description. Monitoring squawks are labelled as such.
• Upcoming downtime — maintenance blocks on the calendar in the next 30 days.
• Links — a button to the Maintenance page with that aircraft preselected, which every member can open, and a link to the full Maintenance Report for maintenance officers and account owners.

The footer explains why the recipient got the email (they are a contact for that aircraft), restates the schedule, and links to the Aircraft Alerts toggle to turn it off.

Aircraft With Nothing to Report

An aircraft with no maintenance schedules, no open squawks, and no upcoming maintenance blocks has nothing to say, so no digest is sent for it. An aircraft whose items are all OK still gets its digest — the digest is a status report, not an alarm, and "everything is fine" is worth hearing on schedule.

Sending Yourself a Preview

The bottom of the Maintenance Digest card has a Send me a preview section. Pick an aircraft and click the button, and the digest for that aircraft is emailed to you only — not to the aircraft's contacts. The subject is prefixed with [Preview] and a banner at the top of the email says so.

A preview does not count as a scheduled send, so the regular digest still goes out on its next scheduled day. Use it to check what your contacts will see before you turn the schedule on, or to look at an aircraft's status on demand without waiting for the next send.

Tips

• Set the digest to land the day before your maintenance officer's usual planning time. If the shop is called on Tuesday mornings, a Monday digest means the list is fresh.
• Monthly is a good default for a small club with a couple of aircraft; weekly suits a fleet that flies a lot or has several tach-based intervals in play.
• List every member who makes decisions about an aircraft as one of its contacts, not just the mechanic. The digest is only as useful as its recipient list.
• Send yourself a preview after setting up a new aircraft's maintenance schedules. It is the quickest way to spot an item with a wrong last-completed date, because it will show as overdue.
• If a contact says they are not receiving it, check in this order: are they a member contact (not external) for the aircraft, is email notifications on in their profile, and have they muted Maintenance Digest for that aircraft under Aircraft Alerts.