Yellow Jacket Flying Club

Background

For the brief time I was a joint BSMS student, I conducted ethnographic research on the practice of flying. My process starts by understanding the practice and community at my university's fly club, Yellow Jacket Flying Club. This understanding and immersion in the community gave me direction to create design guidelines and wireframes to a possible design that solves community and aviation hobby problems.

Problem

The Yellow Jacket Flying Club consists of of Georgia Tech student, faculty, or stuff who connect and pursue their air hobbies together and helps provides opportunities to develop their interests, network with Georgia Tech and non Georgia Tech aviation lovers, participate in flight training, and take advatange of the resources.

1. Majority of the club information were documented on paper and email.
2. Many of the resources and rentals lacked preventative measures for latness, messes amd other errors. The club mostly relied on trust systems. For example, the back of the club room door had the airport keypad code on the back. The mini fridge is filled with cans of sode and another can for change.
3. Resources that are important for pre-flight and during flight are stored in large binders of paper.
4. Unforseen challenges are always occuring. This can come in the form of evolving weather conditions or miscommunication with other pilots due to lack of communication.

Research

Through ethnographic research and observing the community for a new days and flights, I had some important insights that led me to believe that the club had a high passion drive and this created an successful community.

A useful application should include the following in a central place:
1. Show weather and other safety conditions
2. Show important news and updates from the Board of Directors
3. Provide helpful scheduling tools (and responds with feedback and/or error)
4. Provide digital resources
5. Help the community communicate with one another

Solution

The design choice was a mobile application that did not necessarily replaced paper, but provided another organized and more accessible outlet. An important design choice was to make the actions ono-GPs or non-location based because of aircraft signal difficulties.