A Seattle Flight School Designed Like a Skill Tree

XP Flight is getting ready to fly the amphibious ICON A5 on Puget Sound, and it has its own idea about how flight training should feel: every lesson is a step on a skill tree, and every flight earns experience points. The Seattle school is setting up Sky Schedule before its first discovery flight, so the game on the website has a real operation underneath it.

A school that keeps score

The XP Flight website reads more like a pilot profile than a brochure. Visitors join a flight list for launch news and early discovery flights. The discovery flight itself is 45 to 60 minutes in the A5 with a certified instructor, hands on the controls from takeoff, and it is step one of a 59-step tree. After it come the traffic pattern, water landings, first solo, a cross-country, and the checkride, with badges to earn along the way.

The tree also draws a clear line. According to the school, 24 of the 59 steps need no certificate, no medical, and no minimum age. Everything below that line involves FAA paperwork: the student pilot certificate, a medical or driver's license for solo, the pre-solo endorsement.

Why a new school starts with the back office

XP Flight had no previous software to replace. The question was what to build on. A skill tree on the front end only works if the record behind it is right: which steps are done, who signed them off, which documents are on file, and whether the airplane is available. A progress bar that says one thing while the logbook says another is worse than no progress bar at all.

How the pieces line up

Steps become graded lessons

A training program in Sky Schedule is built from lessons and steps. A school can upload a PDF syllabus and let AI draft the program, or build it by hand. An instructor logs each lesson against the flight it happened on, grades every step, and the student countersigns the entry. That is the structure a skill tree needs underneath it: a step counts as done because an instructor logged and graded it. More on how that works in training records.

The paperwork line, handled in onboarding

XP Flight asks students for proof of citizenship before lesson two. Sky Schedule's onboarding collects ID documents as uploads, admins can verify them, and the TSA report downloads each person's ID documents in one ZIP with a summary. Medicals are tracked with expiration dates and class presets, and endorsements carry their own expirations, which matters for a solo endorsement that runs on a 90-day clock.

The airplane, protected

A solo flight missing a document or endorsement is flagged in the booking form and again on the dispatch report, so the instructor sees the gap before the student does. A squawk that grounds the A5 shows on the schedule and turns the preflight check to no-go until the repair is closed out in a work order. The AI dispatch report pulls weather, a risk assessment, and open squawks into one view before each flight.

What launch day looks like

When the first discovery flights go out, the website keeps score and Sky Schedule keeps the record. The idea is that every badge has a logged, graded lesson behind it, with an instructor's name on it. For a school whose whole pitch is that every flight counts, that record is the part that has to be true.