Ops Buddy began in a ready room, with a scheduler photographing a whiteboard at 2200 so the squadron would know what it was flying in the morning. The board was accurate for about an hour. Everything downstream of it — currency, crew availability, the readiness numbers the CO would be asked for on Thursday — was maintained by hand, in separate files, by people who already had full-time jobs.
The obvious fix is to put all of it on one screen. That is not the fix. A prettier picture of the same manual work still costs the same hours, and the hours are the actual problem: they are being paid for by aviators, out of the time the Navy trained them to spend flying.
So the product is built around consequence, not display. A down chit posts to the jacket and the long-range plan already knows. A sim goes down and tonight is rebuilt, with the effect on ARP, ORE and every upgrade timeline computed rather than discovered in six weeks. An aircraft commander calls IMSAFE and the ranked list of people who are legal for that event appears in seconds — which is precisely what makes calling IMSAFE the easy choice.
It is being developed by Thalassa Technologies, LLC, from a working naval aviator’s own squadron workflows — the real flight schedule format, the real NATOPS jacket, the real watchbill — rather than from an assumption about how military scheduling works.
CNAF M-3710.7
Hard rules sourced from
OPNAV 3760/32
NATOPS jacket modelled
18 mo
Fleet NATOPS Evaluation cycle
2
Rule layers, never mixed
Ops Buddy is built by Thalassa Technologies, LLC.