“For too long, private flight departments have relied on outdated spreadsheets to manage their tax records, which has meant a time-consuming and error-prone process,” says Ryan DeMoor, head of aviation tax, MySky. “The IRS, accentuated also last week by President Biden, has announced an increased focus on business aviation – at a time when there can be no room for error, MySky Tax provides the most advanced corporate aviation tax software on the market.” DeMoor is also chair, of the NBAA Tax Committee.

Also read: MySky (AI)ding business aviation operations

The new MySky Tax modules include Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Timeshare Billing, Federal Excise Taxes and 280F Reporting. DeMoor says that this allows flight departments to remain fully compliant with tax reporting without relying on manual data entry. 

“The new reporting modules will enable business aviation users to remain fully compliant when taking advantage of bonus depreciation, while also managing highly regulated timeshare billing and complex Federal Excise Tax calculations,” said DeMoor.

MySky uses artificial intelligence to help aircraft owners and operators track costs.  The new tax modules were announced at NBAA Schedulers & Despatchers Conference (pictured).

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After surveying the industry CJIQ compiled a comprehensive list of every software-based solution available to business aviation. We also asked technology firms what they think are the main drivers behind the digitisation of the industry.

In a bid to uncover what drives digital progress, we asked is it entrepreneurs seeing a gap in the market? Or is it the end user demanding a software-based experience? Also, why does business aviation, despite offering more than 150 software solutions, lag behind even its big sister commercial airlines? From aircraft sales to safety and compliance and from scheduling and fleet management to the charter marketplace, we captured what digital services are available for 21st century business aviation.

Back when financial software provider MySky was founded, the initial push for digitisation came from the owners of aircraft, according to Christopher Marich, global strategy director, MySky. “You can order a car in two seconds from your phone, you can bank, you can broker, sell shares, you can do whatever. But when it came to their private aircraft, owners said this is a big grey zone with no tools to check or understand it,” he tells CJIQ.

Seven years on and that end user has diversified. Marich estimates around 95% of MySky’s customers are operators, corporate flights departments and chief pilots – it has gone from the B2C to B2B. “These guys are the same. If they can order their lunch on Deliveroo in two clicks and it takes 25 emails to order catering for the next flight for a customer, the gap is definitely here I think.”

Alek Vernitsky, CEO, Portside tells CJIQ he thinks demand is mostly internal to the industry. “It is owners and operators wanting digital solutions because they increase efficiency, transparency and enable operators to offer new innovative services. I don’t think this [digitisation] is a case of ‘outside in’ when entrepreneurs come up with a solution that later gets adopted.

“In our case, for example, owners came to me, describing the problem and offering to finance the solution,” he says. Portside is a cloud-based management suite, which stitches together its data from over 70 different aviation systems, for owners and operators of any aircraft.

“Operators know they need it and are actively looking for vendors who can deliver. The owners who came to me were in their 60s and owned large cabin jets. They wanted details about the operations that they couldn’t easily get from the operator (because the operator didn’t have the right software). That’s where our journey started,” says Vernitsky.

Age is just a number when it comes to adoption of tech in business aviation, according to Paul Malicki, CEO, Flapper. He told CJI the company regularly has users aged 70 and over booking through its app. “Definitely there is a strong demand on the user’s end – they want everything to be mobile and on-demand. They also want to control their aircraft expenses and have access to real-time reports,” said Malicki.

CJIQ also canvassed the views of Norm Happ, CEO, Veryon, a leading provider of aviation information services and soft-ware solutions. “The rapid digitalisation of business aviation is revolutionising the industry,” writes Happ. “This shift aligns with the broader trend of digitalisation observed in various sectors sending a clear message: to remain competitive, operators must fully embrace digital advancements. Efficiency and transparency are driving this change.”

Read the full story – including our Tech Map of more than 150 companies – here. Meanwhile, read the digital version of CJIQ here. And,  why not sign up for the free print version of the magazine?  Also, if you have an idea you would like to see covered in the next edition of CJIQ, please let us know.

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AI and how it can streamline otherwise menial tasks is making headlines, but machine learning software has been a focus for MySky since it was founded in 2015. Co-founder and global strategy director of the global technology platform, Marich, told Corporate Jet Investor that AI plays a key role in how MySky’s products and services support business aviation users.

“I think right now everyone seems a little scared of AI and what is happening, but we see it more as a friend to our operators, who should use this technology as an assistant and not as a replacement for your workforce,” said Marich.

“What we identified is that there are a lot of very time-consuming processes in our industry, which require of man hours. These include invoice verification, invoice allocation, breakdown, quoting charter trips with a very low conversion rate — all these are labor-intensive tasks which can easily be performed by a machine. Charter operators have a very thin margin which they try to optimise so they don’t have an exponentially expandable headcount, which leads to a limited human capacity which has to be allocated to various tasks. MySky removes the time consuming, non-added value tasks and automates them,” he added.

This enables human capital to be more pro-active in other areas of the business, such as selling and managing owner relationships, increasing overall profitability along the way.

Jean de Looz, head of Americas, MySky agreed. He said when it comes to tasks that are repetitive in nature, humans are generally not very good at observing for long periods of time. “These types of processes happen all throughout business aviation. When I sold charter there was a saying ‘You’d run the carpet ragged trying to go to a director for approval on a price’. There was a train of people always going to and from the VP of sales. AI can help to remove that.”

MySky views AI the same way as the US military, as a force multiplier, allowing you to do far more work more efficiently in a shorter period of time. But is there a ceiling on how far AI can go to streamline tasks? Marich refers to the various iterations of chatbot Chat GPT (now on version 4 at the time of publication). “It is really hard to gauge what is going to be available in two weeks or two years,” he said. But in terms of business aviation there are a set amount of routine tasks that are linked to the amount of hours the aircraft flies. So there is a margin of progression based on how much more efficient each of those tasks becomes, said Marich.

The MySky team spends a considerable amount of time trying to understand what those processes are, what the bottlenecks in a business could be. “It is as much about the engine as it is about the logic you use in working out where to drive that engine to,” said Marich.

Jean de Looz added: “There are a lot of jobs that are unidimensional in the business. AI can actually make them multidimensional and therefore far more attractive to do. It’s like going from 2D to 3D, if your job consists of line coding and maintenance invoices and you have no idea what you’re doing, now you have contextual intelligence around your tasks because of the AI.” 

“Keep in mind, business continuity is a big risk for many businesses. People leave and it is a big cost for them. Having a system that uses AI can help reduce that, which is advantageous for both parties — for folks looking for work and also for the organisations that want to keep talent,” said de Looz.

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The company said it is unique from other digital tax services as it can be integrated with a customer’s flight operations software. This means it can use flight expense data before it’s invoiced to automatically file taxes for corporate-owned aircraft, saving time and money.

Each tax statement on the platform allows customers to file for multiple business divisions under one umbrella, and trips can be classified as primarily personal or business (mixed-trip demo pictured). The software also explains each tax category and code so that flight departments can accurately report the company’s aircraft use and allow them to take on more business, according to MySky. The platform will automatically update to account for changes in tax code or rates.

“This is such an important resource for the US market,” said Ryan DeMoor, head of Aviation Tax, MySky and vice chair, Tax Committee, NBAA. “For too long, aviation tax has been limited by the arduous task of manual data entry which is subject to clerical errors and slower processing times.” He added that MySky will allow customers to report taxes “faster and more accurately”.

The company said it will begin customer onboarding using existing flight operations integrations. For customers whose operations are not yet integrated with the software, MySky will assist with data inputs to get started.

Back in March, Satcom Direct transitioned its Tax Reporting Service to MySky.

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