Everything about your hardware lives under Fleet in the sidebar: Equipment for inventory and custody, Maintenance for service intervals and work history. This article covers adding aircraft, how aircraft records differ from equipment records, the two custody models, logging maintenance, and how airframe hours accumulate on their own.
Roles matter here. Supervisors add aircraft and log maintenance; unit admins add and edit equipment, delete aircraft, and make long-term assignments.
Before you start. Basic inventory is available on every plan. The custody and check-out system and maintenance logging are paid features — if you do not see the Check Out buttons, the Custody Log, or the Maintenance page, your plan does not include them.
Adding an aircraft to the fleet
On the Equipment page, click Add UAS. The dialog takes a name, brand, model, serial, unit, and status (active, pending, maintenance, or retired — a new aircraft starts as pending), plus FAA Registration, Registration Expires, Purchased, and free-text notes.
Fill in the serial. Flights are matched to an aircraft by serial number, so an aircraft without one gets no flight history, no airframe hours, and no usage charts. The detail page warns you when the serial is missing.
Saving creates the aircraft in the UAS registry and mirrors it into the equipment list as an item of type Aircraft, so it sits in the same table as your controllers and batteries. Later edits go through Edit UAS record in a row's More-actions menu (supervisor and above), or Edit UAS on the aircraft's detail page; the mirrored row keeps in step.
Deleting a UAS is permanent. Delete removes both the aircraft record and its equipment entry and cannot be undone; maintenance logs are deliberately kept. If the aircraft is simply out of service, set its status to
retiredinstead. On the shared hosted plans, retired aircraft also stop counting against your account's aircraft allowance.
The fleet view
The Equipment page opens on four stat cards — Total Items, In Custody, In Maintenance, Service Alerts — over one Inventory table. Each row shows the item name with make, model, and serial beneath it, plus type, unit, status, current custodian, and a usage figure: airframe hours for aircraft, cycle count for batteries. A Service due or Cycle limit badge appears beside the status when a threshold is crossed.
Search matches name, make, model, serial, unit, or custodian; the type dropdown narrows to Aircraft, Controller, Battery, or Other. Every row has an eye icon to the item's detail page and, with custody enabled, a history icon for its chain of custody. Statuses mean specific things:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
available | In the pool, nobody holds it |
checked_out | Out to a pilot for a shift or a job |
assigned | Issued to a pilot long term |
needs_maintenance | Flagged, but still in service |
maintenance | Down for service — custody actions are blocked |
retired | Removed from service |
Aircraft records versus equipment records
There are two record types behind the one table, and the difference matters.
An aircraft record is the registry entry: name, brand, model, serial, FAA registration and expiration, purchase date, unit, status. It is what flight imports match against, and the only place registration details live. You create it with Add UAS.
An equipment record covers everything the fleet holds — aircraft, controllers, batteries, other gear — and carries the operational fields: pool membership, custody, service interval hours, battery cycle warning threshold, notes. Aircraft get one automatically; controllers and other gear you add with Add Equipment (unit admin and above). Batteries usually appear on their own, the first time their serial shows up in imported flight data.
Batteries and controllers carry a second, separate axis called Assignment, set on the item's detail page under Manage: Unassigned, Assigned to aircraft (which requires picking the parent aircraft), or Equipment pool. That is about which airframe a battery belongs with, not who is holding it. An aircraft's detail page lists its linked accessories and lets a manager attach or detach them.
Assignment versus check-out
Custody has two shapes, kept distinct because agencies account for them differently. Both write to the same chain-of-custody ledger.
| Long-term assignment | Daily check-out | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Gear issued to one pilot indefinitely | Gear drawn for a shift or mission |
| Actions | Assign / Unassign | Check Out / Check In |
| Who can do it | Unit admins and above | Any signed-in user, in units set to check-out or hybrid |
| Resulting status | assigned | checked_out |
| How it appears on the row | A greyed Assigned flag; Unassign lives in the More menu | A one-click Check In button |
A unit admin sets the unit's default workflow from the dropdown in the Equipment page header: Daily check-out / check-in, Long-term assignment, or Hybrid (both). The model sets the default workflow, not a hard wall — admins can make long-term assignments under any model.
Long-term units restrict daily check-out. When a unit is set to Long-term assignment, ordinary users can no longer check items out themselves; that action is limited to admins. Pick the model deliberately.
Both actions take a pilot and an optional note (shift, condition, accessories). An item already in someone's custody cannot be checked out or assigned again until it is released, and an item that is retired or in maintenance refuses custody actions entirely.
Seeing who has what
Three places answer the question, at different scopes.
- The Custody column on the Equipment table names the current custodian, with the start date on hover, or "Unit pool" for pooled gear.
- Custody Log (in the Equipment header) opens a Custody Ledger across every item, with a unit filter for global admins and an Export PDF button. Pilots cannot open this page.
- A pilot's detail page has an Equipment tab, counted in the label, listing what that pilot holds, badged
assignedorchecked out, with the date custody started and a link to each item.
The per-item history — every check-out, check-in, assign, and unassign, with who performed it, when, and any note — sits behind the history icon and in the Custody history card on the item's detail page. Entries are written once and not edited afterward, which is what makes the ledger usable as evidence of who held an airframe on a given date. See the recordkeeping and Remote ID audit guide for what an agency self-certifying its own airworthiness standards must be able to produce.
Logging maintenance
Click Log Maintenance on the Maintenance page (supervisor and above), or open it from a specific item's More menu or detail page. Set Status to Performed or Deferred:
- Performed work takes a date, who did it, a type (for example,
100-hour inspection), and a description. For aircraft it also offers Reset service clock, and for an item currently down for service, Return to service, which flips its status back toavailable. - Deferred work takes the date it was identified and a Due by date. Nothing else changes — deferred work never touches the service clock or the item's status, because nothing has happened yet.
Deferred entries stay on the Deferred Work table, sorted by due date, with an Overdue badge once the date passes. When the work gets done, click Mark Performed on that row and give the completion date and technician; the entry converts to performed work with hours captured as of that date.
The rest of the dashboard gives you Fleet Status and Work Types donuts, a monthly activity chart, per-aircraft interval consumption, battery cycles against their limits, a Service Alerts table for anything at or past 80% of its interval or cycle limit, and the recent performed-work log. A unit filter narrows all of it.
Airframe hours, service intervals, and cycle limits
Nobody types airframe time into this product. Hours are summed from the flight logs — air duration where present, log duration otherwise — across flights matched to the aircraft by ID or serial, rounded to a tenth of an hour. Import or log a flight and the number moves.
Set a Service interval (hours) on an aircraft's equipment record and its detail page shows hours since the last service against that interval, with a progress bar. When hours since service reach the interval, the item picks up a Service due badge and lands in Service Alerts. Batteries work the same way with a Cycle warning at threshold, counted from the flights the battery serial appears in.
Hours-at-service are computed as of the service date rather than today, so back-dating an old shop record puts the right number on it. Reset service clock sets last-service hours to that figure and starts the interval over.
Fleet-wide, the Reports page produces an Equipment Usage PDF (airframe hours, flights, average duration, trailing-30-day activity, service utilization, battery cycles) and an Equipment Custody PDF — see reports and exports.
Tracking FAA registration expirations
Registrations are valid for three years, and each aircraft flown under Part 107 registers separately, so a mid-size fleet has a rolling stream of renewals. Record the date in Registration Expires on the UAS record; it then shows on the aircraft's detail page next to the registration number.
To be told about them, open Admin → Notifications & Reminders, enable the Aircraft registration expiration rule, set its lead time in days, and choose whether unit admins, global admins, or both receive it. Expiring and already-expired aircraft are then listed in the periodic admin digest email, named with their registration number and date. Fleet composition and procurement questions — what to buy, and the compliance strings attached — are covered in the agency drone procurement guide.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my aircraft show no airframe hours?
Flights are matched to an aircraft by serial number, so a blank or mistyped serial matches nothing and reports zero hours. The aircraft's detail page shows a warning when no serial is on record. Add the correct serial and the existing flight history attaches immediately, because hours are computed on read rather than stored.
What is the difference between "Needs maintenance" and "In maintenance"?
Needs maintenance means the item is flagged but still usable and still available for custody. In maintenance means it is down for service, and custody actions are refused while it holds that status. Logging performed work on an item that is in maintenance offers a Return to service option that sets it back to available.
Can a pilot check equipment out themselves?
In a unit set to daily check-out or hybrid, yes — check-out and check-in are open to any signed-in user, and both record the name of whoever performed the action. In a unit set to long-term assignment, daily check-out is restricted to admins. Long-term assign and unassign always require a unit admin or higher.
Should I delete an aircraft or retire it?
Retire it. Deleting removes the aircraft record and its equipment entry permanently and cannot be undone, while retiring keeps the record, its usage history, and its place in reports, and takes it out of the active fleet counts. Maintenance logs survive either way, as historical record even for a disposed airframe.
How do batteries get into the equipment list?
Automatically, on first use. When a battery serial appears in imported flight data with no equipment record yet, one is created and linked to the aircraft that flew it. An existing but unassigned battery gets linked the same way. Batteries already tied to an aircraft or placed in the equipment pool are left alone.
Where to go next
Set a service interval on each aircraft and a cycle threshold on each battery — without them, Service Alerts has nothing to measure against. Then confirm the unit's assignment model matches how your agency actually issues gear.
From there, flight records and maps covers how the flights that drive airframe hours get into the system, and reports and exports covers the usage and chain-of-custody PDFs you hand to auditors.