When you're operating a single aircraft type, crew coordination is manageable. You know who's current, you know who to call, and if your first two pilots say no, your third probably says yes.
Neer, CEO of Shino Aviation, hasn't had that luxury for a while. Shino operates around 20 aircraft across five different types — a mix of Part 135 charter and Part 91 private operations. That means when a trip comes in, finding an available pilot isn't the hard part. Finding an available pilot who's current on that specific aircraft is.
"People don't understand how different this is from running three of the same jet," Neer says. "I can't just go down my list. I have to go down five different lists at the same time."
The problem with five types
Most crew coordination tools — and most informal crew coordination habits — are built around the assumption that your pilots are largely interchangeable. Call someone, they're available or they're not, move to the next name.
A mixed-fleet operation doesn't work that way. A pilot who's fully current on one type might not have touched another in eight months. Type ratings don't transfer. And with five different aircraft in the rotation, the subset of pilots who are actually qualified and current for any given trip is smaller than it looks on paper.
Before CrewBench, Shino was managing this the way most operators manage it: a spreadsheet for the bench roster, a folder of PDFs for currency documentation, and a lot of institutional knowledge that lived in Neer's head. It's the same pattern you see across the industry — and the same reason pilot roster management software built specifically for charter operations exists.
"I knew my guys. I knew who was current on what, more or less. The problem is 'more or less' isn't good enough when you've got a trip departing in four hours."
The currency tracking was the biggest pain point. With 20 aircraft and a bench of pilots large enough to cover five types, staying on top of medicals, flight reviews, and type-specific recurrent training across the whole roster was a part-time job on its own. Things slipped. Not dangerously — Neer is meticulous — but enough to create friction. A pilot would show up for a trip check and something had lapsed. A last-minute scramble would follow.
The staffing call that took two hours
There was one trip that stuck with him. A Part 135 charter, departing the following morning, that needed a captain current on one of the less common types in the fleet. Neer worked through his contacts from memory, calling pilots one by one. First one was on another trip. Second was available but his medical had lapsed two weeks earlier — something Neer hadn't caught because it wasn't in front of him. Third was current and interested, but called back thirty minutes later to say he'd checked his schedule and had a conflict.
Two hours later, Neer had his crew. The trip operated fine. But two hours of the CEO's time to staff one flight, on a day when several other things also needed his attention, was a number he couldn't keep ignoring.
"That's not a sustainable way to run an operation. I needed to be able to look at a trip, know in thirty seconds who's qualified, current and available, and have them confirmed in fifteen minutes — not two hours."
What changed
Shino started using CrewBench to manage the bench pilot roster across all five aircraft types. Each pilot's profile tracks their type ratings and key currency dates. When a trip comes in, Neer filters by aircraft type and sees immediately which pilots are qualified and current. He sends an SMS notification to all of them at once and takes the first confirmed reply.
The simultaneous outreach was the shift that made the biggest difference. Instead of working through pilots sequentially — call, wait, call again — the trip goes out to everyone relevant at the same time. Most of the time, he has a confirmed pilot within ten or fifteen minutes.
"The filtering is what I kept coming back to. I don't need to remember who's current on what anymore. I just filter by type, and the list is right there. It sounds simple but when you're managing five types it saves a lot of mental overhead."
The Part 91 side of the operation runs through the same system. Some operators keep their 135 and 91 crew separate, but Shino's bench pilots often fly both sides depending on the trip. Having a single roster that covers both removes a layer of coordination that used to require toggling between different lists. It's the kind of thing that Part 135 crew scheduling software designed for real mixed operations handles cleanly — where generic tools tend to fall apart.
Still a hands-on operation
It's worth saying that CrewBench didn't change how Neer runs Shino Aviation. He's still the one making calls on crew assignments. He still knows his pilots personally and has preferences that no software is going to override. What changed is how long the administrative side of those decisions takes.
"I'm still choosing who to send the notification to. I'm still the one confirming the trip. It's not like it runs itself. But the part that used to take ninety minutes now takes ten, and that matters when you're doing this every day across a fleet this size."
At 20 aircraft and growing, the operational complexity at Shino isn't getting simpler. But the crew coordination piece, at least, is no longer the thing that eats the morning.