Matt Thurber, editor-in-chief at AIN Media Group, has been flying since 1975 and writing about aviation since 1978 and now has the best job in the world, running editorial operations for Aviation International News, Business Jet Traveler, and FutureFlight.aero. In addition to working as an A&amp;P mechanic on everything from Piper Cubs to turboprops, Matt taught flying at his father’s flight school in Plymouth, Mass., in the early 1980s, flew for an aircraft owner/pilot, and for two summer seasons hunted swordfish near the George’s Banks off the East Coast from a Piper Super Cub. An ATP certificated fixed-wing pilot and CFII and commercial helicopter pilot, Matt is type-rated in the Citation 500 and Gulfstream V/550. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Matt and his team cover the entire aviation scene including business aircraft, helicopters, avionics, safety, manufacturing, charter, fractionals, technology, air transport, advanced air mobility, defense, and other subjects of interest to AIN, BJT, and FutureFlight readers.

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Digital aircraft records management provider Bluetail has released a new addition to its software-as-a-service platform, the use of AI tools to automatically identify, organize, and place any scanned document “in precise chronological order within the logbook.” This makes searching for any maintenance-related information much easier and allows aircraft owners and maintainers to quickly access pertinent information or share specific information with third parties such as regulators.
“We’ve been creating and now implementing our AI strategy for aircraft maintenance records,” said Bluetail CEO Roberto Guerrieri, “and we have taken some substantial steps over the last couple months. We’ve been investing in AI for over a year now.”
While some owners still use paper maintenance documents, he added, “We are seeing people move to digital, and I think that it’s [due to] a lot of the evangelizing that we’ve been doing.” Even with digital logbooks, some owners back those up with printed copies organized into binders and use manual processes to access information. “The issues are still out there,” he said. “Compliance tracking is still complex, and it’s error-prone. Audits take weeks.”
Bluetail’s AI-powered digital logbooks are designed to help reduce time, save money, and increase aircraft availability and safety. “The data is where we’re playing,” he said. “It’s still trapped in paper and PDFs, but what [we’re doing] is AI working in a purposeful way to take on the issue of keeping up with your logbooks.”
What this means in practice, explained chief technology officer Kent Pickard, is that Bluetail can take any document formatted in any way, including handwritten, and turn that into structured data. This includes the date, time, work performed, part and serial numbers, and the mechanic or repair station sign-off. “We’re able to turn any format of document into consistent sets of information that we can further build on,” he said. An example would be the conformity process to add an aircraft to a charter certificate. “AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting and produce a report…in a few hours, work that could have taken weeks in the past.” It’s not just automating tasks but also “freeing the data and insights that are trapped in paper and [different] formats into something actionable.”
Guerrieri clarified that the Bluetail AI model that it has trained to provide these features is private, and no data is shared outside of Bluetail’s system. “We’re not sending information to OpenAI or ChatGPT to then do some analysis. That happens within our walled garden,” Pickard said.
In a demonstration of the new AI features, Bluetail product manager Rachel Taylor showed how the user can click from the dashboard into the most recent logbook entry, then view all entries in chronological order. The user can flip through entries for that aircraft, similar to viewing sequential pages in a printed logbook, or even view complementary logbooks at the same time, for example, the airframe and engine logbooks, to verify that maintenance events are consistent.
Filters can be set to view certain document types, such as 8130 forms (parts), form 337 (major repairs and alterations), and task cards, and the user can also confirm that these are associated with the proper logbook entry. “You’re building your work package,” she said. “Here’s your logbook entry and supporting documents, and you can scroll through seamlessly and flip through the entire history of that maintenance.”
“In the paper world,” Pickard added, “you’d have three binders on your desk, flipping through them, trying to stay in sync. You might be looking at a maintenance-tracking system to figure out when some maintenance might have been performed. All those [Bluetail features]…combine the binders into one, chronologically. You can show more or fewer pages depending on the level of review you’re doing. For someone who needs to come up to speed on an aircraft and maintain and review the records, this is big magnitudes more efficient than the paper world.”
Another benefit of the AI-powered logbooks is more sophisticated search capabilities that allow users to isolate recurring problems much faster or look for, say, a 337 form that is somewhere in the documents but missing its association with the logbook entry for the work that was done. Bluetail AI’s handwriting recognition makes this even more powerful. “We still have the full power of the search capabilities, whether it's text or handwriting,” Taylor said.
Any of the search results can easily be shared with anyone, not just Bluetail customers, and the user can set expiration dates for the shared information so that it disappears after a certain period. The user can also revoke access at any time or restore it if necessary. Conversely, a maintenance shop working on an aircraft with Bluetail digital logbooks could easily research a wiring change done during a modification if any questions were raised because the wiring doesn’t match the OEM’s maintenance manual diagram.
One important element of digital logbooks is the ability to capture the history of any changes made to digital documents. This provides full traceability, something impossible to do with paper. “We’re seeing the who, the what, and the when,” Taylor said.
“Your [paper] binder is not going to make a note of someone ripping some pages out of it,” Pickard added. The digital logbooks are “effectively far more tamper-proof than paper records in the physical world.”
Before going live on February 24, about 10 Bluetail customers were provided early access to test the new AI features. Dozens more have signed up since then, according to Guerrieri.
This product is not just for older aircraft but even factory-fresh aircraft, he said. “If you want to know your plane’s history from origination, why not get on Bluetail right now?” Aircraft move from owner to owner and often switch maintenance-tracking services, he pointed out, “and there’s this whole disconnect. We like to put that all together so the owner knows the ancestry of that plane.”
“We think it…increases value,” Pickard said, “but it definitely prevents devaluing by having it protected from day one.”
Owners can transfer the Bluetail subscription to a new owner upon sale of the aircraft. But if a customer decides to stop using Bluetail, they can take their data. “We would never hold someone’s data hostage,” Taylor said. “It’s their records. If they need assistance getting copies and downloads of all their records, we would be happy to accommodate them.”
“At Bluetail,” Guerrieri said, “innovation means more than building software; it means applying intelligence to unlock the full value of aircraft records. We are continuously evolving our platform to turn data into insight for customers and future partners alike.”

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