Scheduling & Calendar

Book flights on a shared calendar with color-coded member slots, EFB handoff, and calendar sync.

Overview

The calendar screen is where your group manages aircraft bookings. Each member gets a unique color, making it easy to see at a glance who has the airplane reserved.

Scheduling is available on Club plans only. Solo accounts do not include a shared calendar.

Groups managing more than one aircraft see the aircraft picker at the top of this screen too — see The Aircraft Picker for how it works. Bookings are scoped to whichever tail is selected.

Viewing the Calendar

The calendar shows a month at a time: a filled day is booked all day, a bar along the bottom is part of a day, and red marks maintenance (see Reading the Calendar). Tap any day to see the full details of bookings on that date.

Open squawks for the aircraft on screen are listed above the calendar, grounding ones in red, so you see them before you book. Tap one to go to the Maintenance screen.

Your club can choose to have members open the app on the Calendar instead of Home (Settings → Flying Club Settings → Member Experience), and you can choose it for yourself in My View.

Creating a Booking

To book the airplane:

1. Tap Book Time on the home screen, or tap the + Book Time button on the Calendar screen, or tap on an empty day

2. Select your start and end dates on the availability calendar — booked days show in each pilot’s color (blue for yours and grey for others in clubs of more than six pilots), so you can see what’s open before you save. Tap your first day, then your last. If your trip would run into someone else’s booking, the calendar stops at the last open day and tells you who has the plane, and it shows how long the plane is free from your start date. (Days with only part-day bookings appear faded and stay pickable for a timed booking — the exact times are checked when you save.)

3. Choose full-day or set specific start/end times (15-minute intervals)

4. Optionally add:

   • Trip name (e.g., “Weekend at Orcas Island”) — leave it blank and the booking is titled with the pilot’s name, e.g. “Rob Anderson”. Clubs that book by date rather than by trip can skip it entirely.
   • Destination — search by airport code or name. Hours will be estimated based on route distance and aircraft speed set on the Settings page.
   • Comments Your club may have hidden Trip Name, Destination, or Comments, or set new bookings to start as timed rather than full-day. See Settings → Member Experience.

5. If the flight is a shared group expense (e.g., flying to a maintenance facility), check Maintenance / Group Expense. This tags the booking so that when it’s converted to a logged flight, the flight is excluded from the pilot’s personal monthly bill.

6. Tap Save to create the booking

Max Booking Length

Owners and Admins set a maximum number of consecutive days a member can book the airplane in a single reservation (configured in Settings > Member Monthly Billing).

• Owners and Admins can exceed this limit when needed — they’ll see a prompt confirming the override.
• Regular members who try to exceed the limit will see a message directing them to contact the group owner to arrange the booking.

Clubs with written bylaws can set finer rules instead (upcoming bookings per member, weekend bookings, normal and extended lengths, and more) under Settings → Flying Club Settings. See Scheduling Rules.

Editing and Deleting Bookings

Tap any booking to expand it and see the full details. From there you can:

• Edit any field (dates, destination, comments, etc.) if you originally created the booking
• Delete the booking if you created it or are an Admin/Owner
• Open in EFB — tap the destination identifier or route to launch ForeFlight or Garmin Pilot with the route preloaded
• Log Flight — convert the booking directly into a logged flight with pre-filled dates. This option becomes available once the booking’s end date is today or earlier.

Reading the Calendar

Each day on the calendar answers two questions, on two separate channels:

• Shape says how much of the day is taken. A filled day is booked all day, including the middle days of a multi-day trip; a bar along the bottom means part of the day, such as the first or last day of a timed trip, so there may still be room. Tap the day to see the times.
• Color says whose it is. In a group of up to six pilots, every pilot has their own color, the same on the calendar, booking cards and member list. When two pilots share a day, they sit side by side in the cell.

A red cap across the top of a day marks a maintenance window. The legend shows a miniature of each cell, so the shapes you’re matching are the shapes in the grid.

Larger clubs: blue and grey

There are six pilot colors, so in a club with more than six pilots, two people would share one. Past six, the calendar switches on its own to blue for your bookings and grey for everyone else’s: the question most people are asking by then is can I fly that day? Tap any day to see who has it. Mechanics don’t count toward the six.

On the web dashboard, a club (or any member, in My View) can also choose the Detailed calendar, which labels every booking with its times and pilot.

The same view on a phone, in a club with more than six pilots. The red caps along the top of the days are a maintenance window, with the grounding squawk above the calendar; grey days are taken by somebody else, blue is yours.

Taking the Aircraft Out of Service (Club)

Scheduled maintenance is booked from the calendar, because deciding when to take an aircraft down is a scheduling decision — you need to see who you’d be displacing.

Tap Book Time and, if you’re an Owner, Admin, A&P Mechanic or Maintenance Officer, you’ll see Take the aircraft out of service at the top of the form. Turning it on swaps the flight fields for a short description and keeps the dates.

As you pick dates, the form tells you how many existing bookings fall inside the window and whose they are — before you save, while you can still choose a different week.

Maintenance is allowed to overlap existing bookings. An annual doesn’t move because someone booked a Saturday, so the usual “that day is taken” blocking doesn’t apply here. You still see every booking on the calendar while you choose.

Picking the dates tells you who is in the way before you commit:

Club scheduling rules don’t apply either — taking the aircraft down isn’t a reservation and isn’t counted as one against anybody’s limits.

On the web dashboard, the same Take the aircraft out of service switch is at the top of the booking form on the Flights page, and you can move a window’s dates right from the calendar — see Web Flights → Taking the Aircraft Out of Service. It can also be set up from the Maintenance page — see Web Maintenance.

Standby Bookings

When a maintenance window covers a flight you’ve booked, your booking is not cancelled. It stays yours, marked Standby, and you’re emailed to explain why.

The reasoning is that maintenance often finishes early. Cancelling bookings on an estimate would throw away everyone’s plans for something that may not happen — so you keep your slot and simply sit second in line behind the work.

You’ll get one of three emails:

Nobody is emailed twice about the same flight for the same reason, however often the window is edited.

You can book over an existing maintenance window too. You’ll be warned, not blocked — the window may lift early, and if it does you’ll be told.

Converting Bookings to Flights

After you fly, you can convert your booking into a logged flight:

1. Open the booking from the calendar
2. Tap Log Flight (on the web dashboard, it’s a button at the bottom of the booking)
3. The date, aircraft, route and comments are filled in from the booking, and Tach Out from the last flight. Usually all that’s left is your Tach In, plus landings if you track currency (or tap Prefill flight data to fill most of it automatically)
4. Save to log the flight

The option appears on your own bookings once the booking’s end date is today or earlier.

The booking stays on the calendar. It’s the club’s record that the trip happened, so logging the flight never removes it. Instead the booking is marked Logged (on the web, Flight logged) and Log Flight disappears, so the same trip can’t be logged twice by accident. A booking counts as logged once its pilot has a flight on that aircraft dated within the booking.

EFB Handoff

Tap the destination airport identifier on any booking detail to open the route in your EFB (ForeFlight Mobile or Garmin Pilot). If a multi-leg route is entered, the chooser opens with the full route preloaded.

See EFB Integration for details.

Getting Bookings Into Other Calendars

5-by-5 has two different ways to mirror your group’s bookings into another calendar app — they’re separate features, found in different places in the app, and serve different use cases.

Option 1: Calendar Sync (Settings page, on this device only)

This option lives in Settings > Calendar Sync and writes 5-by-5 bookings directly into the native calendar app on the same phone (Apple Calendar on iOS, Google Calendar on Android). When enabled:

• All group bookings appear as calendar events on your phone
• Events update automatically as bookings are created, modified, or deleted
• Toggle on or off any time from Settings
• Works only on the device where you enable it — sign in on a different phone and you’d need to enable it there too

Calendar Sync requires a paid plan (Solo or Club). Free tier users will be prompted to upgrade when they enable it.

Option 2: Subscribe to Calendar (button at the bottom of the Calendar page)

This option lives at the bottom of the Calendar screen as a Subscribe to Calendar button. It generates an ICS feed URL that you can subscribe to from any calendar app — Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, even shared family calendars. Use this when:

• You want bookings to appear on a desktop calendar
• You want to share group bookings with a non-member (spouse, dispatcher, etc.) without giving them a 5-by-5 account
• You want the feed accessible from multiple devices without re-enabling sync each time

Using AI to Manage Bookings

The AI Assistant can both answer questions about the calendar and take actions on your behalf. Common plain-language asks:

Read:

• “Who has the airplane this weekend?”
• “What dates is the airplane free in July?”
• “When was my last flight to Roche Harbor?”

Write:

• “Book the airplane Saturday afternoon for a trip to Friday Harbor.”
• “Cancel my Saturday booking.”
• “Move my June 14 booking to June 15.”

For any action that creates, changes, or deletes a booking, the assistant summarizes what it’s about to do and asks you to confirm before executing. You can cancel or reschedule your own bookings; admins and owners can manage any booking. Tap the microphone on your keyboard to drive the whole thing by voice.

See AI Assistant for the full capability picture, privacy details, and limitations.