Our client is one of Europe’s largest universities. They have a special department for higher studies in aviation. We have developed a student information system (SIS) for co-ordinating flight training. The heart of the system comprises an event calendar and resource planning tool tightly integrated with Microsoft Exchange Server.

The application is mainly used by the trainers to relate syllabus to students, plan theory and practical sessions and evaluate students. It is also used for record keeping of pilots and aircrafts and notifying concerned personnel on events that require periodic attention and maintenance.

The students have a separate login to see the class schedules and download their results as PDF. The application has a ticket management system for resolving aircraft and simulator issues.

The project includes continuous development and maintenance of features such as:

• Resource Management – Organized view of aircrafts, classrooms, personnel etc, status tracking and email alerts when a resource requires attention.
• Syllabus Creation – Each training program has multiple phases and each phase consists of multiple exercises.
• Ledger Management – For planning & keeping track of exercises for each student.
• Flight Scheduler – An event management system, for scheduling flight sessions with the help of a calendar and a resource allocator.
• Student Evaluation – Flight time calculations and evaluation of pilot trainees, results are emailed to trainees in PDF formats and retrieves their acknowledgement.

We have incorporated a file management module which supports ajax file uploading for attaching relevant documents. The application has a ticket management system which works like Freshdesk. Trainers use ticket management system to book issues in aircrafts, which is then updated and resolved by technicians.

As the system has a number of user types, user access to various modules are controlled by a Role & Permission Manager. Admin can assign hierarchical permissions to users under various roles.

The most complex part of the project was the integration of the application events calendar with Microsoft Exchange Server. We were able to synchronise any changes in application events with the Exchange Server through EWS API and vice versa.

The project also offers rich user interaction via datatables, context menus, treeviews etc. We have started the development in 2013 and used CodeIgniter and Bootstrap as foundation frameworks. Today, we use Laravel for building such large and complex web applications.