A new app for Android and Apple smartphones, pilotshelp, has been created by a small Brazilian start-up company. It's adapted from a guide to airports that has proved popular with pilots in the country.

São Paulo-based Pilot’s Help Technology was formed to acquire the app developer, and the new company employs the guide's founder Joao Carlos Marques, who remains as a technical consultant.

Here at LABACE visitors can find more about Pilot’s Help at the AeroSafety/Medaire exhibit (3006), where AeroSafety founder Carlos Cretella and senior consultant Yavor Luketic (now co-CEO of Pilot’s Help Technologies) are also the new co-owners of Pilot’s Help. Both helped drive the launch of the new app, which incorporates information maintained by Cretella for his printed guide.

Luketic told AIN that the app includes “everything about aviation” in Brazil, but their ambition is to go beyond Brazil to have information on the rest of Latin America, centered on easy-to-navigate airport information—and then the United States and beyond.

The functionality is based on maps showing airports and helipads, such as the numerous helipads along São Paulo’s Brigadeiro Faria Lima Avenue, the main financial district. “We’re starting here, but it is in our project to include the main cities in Latin America. Then, if all goes well, in 2019, we’ll add U.S. cities,” he said.

Although the app currently lacks flight planning, Luketic said a relationship is being developed with an as-yet unnamed partner to provide this. For now the app contains far more information than most airport data guides, extending to background information on regulations and anything else useful for pilots. “It’s in our plans to do some development and integration with a partner and add other interesting features as well,” he said. “We can’t reveal yet exactly what these will be.”

In addition, the company plans to print an updated version of the printed Pilot’s Help guide, which has been out of print for two years, and will be making the Pilot’s Help app, which is currently $4.99, free after September 1. For revenue the app will rely on advertisers—of which it already has a few—and premium features.

As well as promoting the new app here at LABACE, Luketic said that he and the Pilot’s Help team will be attending the new Expomarte aviation show at Campo de Marte Airport, in São Paulo, October 26-29.