Wingman: Pilot Hiring
Marketplace
Aviation
CLIENT
Wingman Pilot
CATEGORY
Marketplace
TIMEFRAME
7 Weeks
SERVICE
Product Strategy
Development
About Project
- Pilot sourced in 6 hours at median, against three to five days of calls.
- 8,900 verified pilots with credentials and currency tracked.
- 34,000 flights staffed through the platform.
- Owner cost down 22% against agency placement.
- Zero currency or certification lapses on platform-booked flights.
- Built in 7 weeks.
Challenge & Solution
Challenge
Aircraft owners struggled to identify qualified pilots for private flights while pilots lacked centralized platforms to access gig based aviation opportunities.
Solution
We created a pilot hiring marketplace that enables aircraft owners to review credentials and hire pilots efficiently while helping aviation professionals access flexible flight opportunities.
An aircraft owner who does not fly their own aircraft needs a pilot, and the way that works is a phone number given to them by someone at the airport. If that pilot is unavailable, they call around until someone answers.
The verification problem underneath it is the serious part. A pilot needs the right ratings, current medical, currency on type, and appropriate insurance. Owners were confirming this by asking, and sometimes by looking at a logbook, which is a check that assumes a level of aviation knowledge many owners do not have.
Pilots had the corresponding problem. Plenty fly professionally on a contract basis and had no way to be found beyond their own network. Both sides were relying on the same small circle of personal referrals, which is fine until the person you always call is on holiday and you have a flight on Thursday.
The automatic currency blocking is what changed the risk profile for owners. Verification stopped being something they had to know how to do and became something the system refuses to let through.
For pilots, contract flying became a viable primary income rather than something supplementing a main job, mostly because the platform produces enough consistent work to plan around. The saved roster feature has quietly recreated the personal network model, with verification underneath it.
Pilot profiles carrying licence, ratings, type currency, medical validity, total and type-specific hours, and insurance status, verified at onboarding and monitored for expiry.
Matching runs on aircraft type first, since a pilot current on the specific airframe is a hard requirement rather than a preference, then on availability and location.
Currency and medical expiry block a pilot from accepting a flight automatically, which is what produces the zero-lapse figure and is the feature owners cite most.
Beyond that: flight requests with routing, schedule and duty-time considerations, transparent rate agreement before acceptance, payment held and released after completion, logbook entries generated from completed flights, and a saved roster so an owner can build a small pool of pilots they trust.
Typography & Color
