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8 min read
Ask most flight school owners how the business is doing and they will tell you about enrollments. Ask them how many hours each airplane flew last month, how many hours it was available to fly, and why the flights that got cancelled got cancelled, and the answers get vague fast.
That gap is what brought Carolina Gianardi into aviation.
She is the CEO and co-founder of Intuos, and before that she spent thirty years in large corporations, mostly in financial services. GE Capital. Poste Italiane. Then American Express in Italy, working in finance, payments, B2B, sales and marketing. She has been in aviation for four years.
When she finally looked at flight training with a financial lens, one thing jumped out.
“We always talk about training, training, training, but we never really look at the fact that probably a flight school, before being a training organization, should be an asset management organization. The assets they own or lease to operate the business are very, very expensive, and looking at them at their return on investment is a different perspective I’m trying to bring into the industry.”
That is the argument this episode runs on.
What Intuos actually is
Intuos connects what happens on the ground at your school with what happens in the airplane. Two plug and play devices, both proprietary and patent protected.
The first handles telemetry. GPS variables plus an onboard AHRS sensor giving pitch, roll, and yaw, which lets the system flag maneuvers approaching the edge of the envelope. Data transmits to the ground in real time, so someone at the school can watch a maneuver as it happens rather than reconstructing it afterward.
Tim asked whether this is essentially a black box for general aviation. Gianardi said that is the starting point, with two additions. The data moves in real time instead of only after an event. And once the aircraft lands, you get trend analysis, not just a single flight. Every flight on that airframe. Every flight by that student, across whichever aircraft they flew.
The second device monitors the engine and propeller, and it does it by listening. Algorithms translate cockpit audio into propeller RPM, an accelerometer measures vibration, and the system fuses the two to detect anomalies. No sensor goes inside your engine. Aircraft without modern avionics can use it.
The question every owner asks first: does this need an STC?
No. The system is not connected to your avionics, which is the whole reason it qualifies as plug and play. In Europe and South Africa, Intuos operates under EASA CS-STAN as a standard change, meeting weight and non-interference requirements without special approval. Gianardi drew a comparison to the FAA’s policy for non-required safety enhancing equipment.
The tradeoff she named without being asked: the system does not read airspeed. Angle of attack is calculated using machine learning rather than measured directly.
When it actually pays off
Gianardi was straight about this, and it is worth quoting because most vendors would not say it.
If you operate five or six aircraft, you can keep it under control yourself. You know who has been flying. You know if something felt strange. Your 50 and 100 hour inspections are catching things.
The math changes above eight to ten aircraft. At that point the spreadsheet stops working and scheduled maintenance alone stops being enough.
Three places she sees the return:
Training feedback with evidence. Instructors do not have time between flights to give a complete debrief, and going back later means details are already lost. With the flight recorded, it can be replayed in 2D or 3D at any time, with instructor comments attached. Multiple flights from the same student can be compared to find what needs reinforcement.
Back office time. Her customers report roughly twenty minutes of administration per flight. Logbook entries, registering information, paperwork. When the device populates that automatically, the job shifts from data entry to reviewing numbers for accuracy.
Maintenance cost avoidance. This is the one she called the biggest opportunity and the hardest to communicate. When an aircraft goes down unexpectedly you do not just pay the maintenance bill. You lose the revenue those hours would have generated. Continuous monitoring lets you anticipate a problem and fold the fix into the 100 hour inspection you already had scheduled.
The utilization number
Tim pushed for a specific target: how many hours should an aircraft fly to sit in the profitable zone without getting worked to death?
“The aircraft start to be good in terms of utilization from 600 hours per year, something between 600 and 800. If you go above, then probably the stress and the maintenance cost could grow.”
That works out to roughly 50 to 67 hours a month. Tim noted he has typically told schools to aim for 70, and that below 50 you are generally losing money on the airframe.
The word Gianardi kept using was optimal, not maximum. Fly the airplane too hard and the extraordinary maintenance bill erases the revenue the extra hours brought in. If your fleet is running at the top of that range and demand is still there, the answer is another airplane, not more hours on the ones you have.
The KPIs most schools are not tracking
Her list, in her order:
- Hours of availability per aircraft
- Hours of utilization per aircraft
- Reservations and cancellations
- The reason for each cancellation
- Extraordinary maintenance events
The cancellation reason is the one she spent the most time on, and it is the one almost nobody logs. A booking existed and then it did not, and there is no record of why. That single field tells you whether you have an instructor availability problem, a student commitment problem, or weather. Three completely different problems with three completely different fixes, and without the data they all look identical on the schedule.
Extraordinary maintenance is her second flag. A rise in unscheduled work means either your scheduled maintenance is not being performed properly or the aircraft is not being operated the way it should be. Her example was hard landings, which do not always get reported. Two or three go unmentioned, and the next flight brings a real problem with the gear.
Tim added the version he has seen from the marketing side. A school kept replacing flap motors on one airplane. When they finally looked at the flight data, one instructor was dumping flaps on final above the white arc. The airplane was not the problem.
Standardization, and the line you do not cross
That flap story leads directly to the part of this conversation that will be argued about in break rooms.
Flight data shows you what your instructors are doing. Gianardi is clear that this is the point, and equally clear about how fast it goes wrong.
“It must be clear that it is not like being in court. You are not with a judge there.”
Her position is that safety data has to come from school leadership framed as a way to grow together, not as a tool to control and blame. The moment an instructor believes the box exists to catch them, you have lost both the safety culture and the data, because people stop reporting.
Her practical starting point for a smaller school that is not buying anything yet:
“If you agree which should be the process of the debrief from the instructor to the student, this is already the way in which you transfer to your instructor the culture.”
You do not standardize instructors by managing instructors individually. You standardize the process they run. Define what a debrief covers, what gets highlighted as positive and negative, and you have communicated what your school expects without ever having a difficult conversation about any one person.
For more on this, our episode with Brandon Williams goes deep on structuring an effective post-flight debrief.
The ROI conversation, and why it is different in America
Intuos has been working in Europe and South Africa. The US is new. Gianardi said the American market is noticeably more open to listen, and also asks one question far more insistently than Europe does: what is my ROI?
She called that a fair question and a hard one to answer, because the return does not show up where owners look for it.
“People think about revenue and then think about the cost of a solution like Intuos, and they are not really able by themselves to connect the cost with the revenue, that is more not increasing revenue but reducing cost and improving the quality of your product and attract more students.”
The revenue side is real but indirect. A school that can show a student their own flight replayed, with specific feedback attached, is selling something different from a school debriefing from memory. The larger return sits on the cost side, in the maintenance events that never happened.
Which brings her to the honest problem with all of this.
“In any industry, too many data do not mean better information.”
Nobody running a flight school has time to become a data analyst. The work Intuos is doing, and the work Gianardi named as the real challenge for everyone building in this space, is deciding which handful of numbers actually change a decision and putting only those in front of an owner.
Episode Highlights
- Why a flight school is an asset management organization first and a training organization second
- What a plug and play flight data system captures, and why no STC is required
- The fleet size where flight data monitoring starts paying for itself
- The 600 to 800 hour annual utilization target, and why maximum is not the goal
- Five KPIs to track, including the cancellation reason field almost nobody logs
- How hard landings hide in your maintenance costs
- Standardizing your instructors by standardizing the debrief, not by policing people
- Building a safety culture that is not a courtroom
- Where the real ROI sits, and why it is not in the revenue line
About Carolina Gianardi
Carolina Gianardi is the CEO and co-founder of Intuos, an aviation technology company building flight data monitoring and operations software for general aviation and flight training. Before aviation she spent thirty years in large corporations, primarily in financial services, with roles across finance, payments, B2B, sales and marketing at GE Capital, Poste Italiane, and American Express in Italy.
She co-founded Intuos with Vito Tedeschi, whose background is in technology and aviation and who is a private pilot. The company is headquartered in Italy with operations at L’Aquila Airport.
Connect with Carolina and Intuos
Gianardi was direct about what she is looking for in the US right now, and it is not a sale.
“We are here in the US to learn and to bring value. I’m not at this stage looking for customers. I’m more looking for counterparts we can really discuss with. Feel free to reach out. We can set up a video call, walk you through the solution, get your input, your feedback.”
- Website: intuos.aero
- Email: carolina.gianardi@intuos.it
Carolina and the Right Rudder Marketing team will both be at the Ascend Flight Training Summit in Dallas on September 8, hosted by Aero Summit and Stratus Financial in partnership with the National Association of Flight Instructors. Come find us.
Grow Your Flight School
Want to be a guest on the show? Call us at 314-804-1200 or email info@rightruddermarketing.com.
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