General Aviation Maintenance Software

Problem

General aviation maintenance shops lose most of an inspection day before a wrench turns. Someone has to read the aircraft’s logbooks, chase every applicable AD and SB, find the right part numbers, and write the return-to-service entry — roughly five hours of research admin per aircraft.

Cloudline was built by the team that ran and engineered FlightAware to collapse that work to under an hour. The software had to communicate two things at once to a sceptical, safety-critical audience: that it reads the records thoroughly and cites every claim to its source page, and that it never makes the airworthiness call — that stays with the certified A&P. The brand had to feel like instrumentation, not a startup.

Solution & Impact

I developed the brand and design system: a “Sky” blue scale anchored on Sky Deep for authority and dark surfaces, a Storm green as the secondary brand and action colour, DM Sans paired with IBM Plex Mono for the technical register, and Phosphor Icons throughout. The system ships as Tailwind-compatible tokens so it can be applied consistently across the marketing site and the product surfaces — Logbook and Relay.

The design work centred on the trust boundary. Every layout decision reinforces “software reports facts, mechanics make the call”: cited sources shown inline, status framed as a determination rather than a verdict, and a visual hierarchy that puts the mechanic’s judgment above the machine’s output.

The marketing site was then built directly from that system — implemented via an AI-assisted build working from the tokens, type scale, and component specs rather than from hand-authored markup. The design system was the deliverable; the site is what it produced. Working this way is why the guide was written as Tailwind-compatible tokens in the first place: a system precise enough to be executed without me in the loop is a system that holds up when a developer, or a model, builds against it.