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Every airport with its own record

Every region with its patterns. Every country on real data.

Smaller airports everywhere are under-served by the mainstream aviation technology industry. They run on paper and spreadsheets, so they have no statistics and no history, and neither does anyone who plans for them. We exist to give every airport, however small, a trusted record of its own activity.

A brochure for your organisation, the helicopter view in five pages, and the product brochure in detail.

A brochure for your organisation ↓ The helicopter view (PDF) → The product brochure (PDF) →
Each about 1 MB. Or read the pages below.
CADLive · Canada
USDLive · United States
EURLive · Europe
ZARLive · South Africa

Document one · five pages

The helicopter view

Why we exist, and the view nobody has yet

Each airport keeps its own record: movements, services, permits and tenants, captured as they happen on a phone, a tablet or a desk, and locked to that airport. It shares with a group or a region only when its administrator agrees. The group, the region and the country see patterns, never one airport's figures beside another's. The number you quote is the number the airport recorded.

Helicopter view page 1: why we exist, and the view nobody has yet. Each airport its own record; regions and the country see patterns, by consent.

Page 1. Every airport its own locked record; it rolls up by consent, as patterns, not figures.

Every movement, seen and verified

Our own ADS-B receivers on an open design, the tower and the radio, smart cameras on the apron and runway, staff with a phone that works without signal, and the operators and pilots themselves on the portal. Every source feeds one pipeline: received as it happens, cleaned and matched to one aircraft, counted once. An aircraft flying silent is still recorded. No commercial flight tracker ever sees the data, and the paper strips can stay.

Helicopter view page 2: every movement, seen and verified. Five sources feed one pipeline to the airport's picture, the region's and the country's.

Page 2. Transponders, the tower, cameras, staff and pilots feed one pipeline: every aircraft becomes one trusted record.

What the data tells a group, a region, a country

Transport planning on movements by kind of flying, month and year. Economic development on the activity the airport itself recorded. A climate baseline counted from landings by type and weight, not modelled. Flight training seen as landings, not flights. And for the airport itself, every landing as a wear event: runway wear by end, weight on the pavement, heavy stands, equipment due before it fails. Each airport owns its data and can withdraw its consent at any time.

Helicopter view page 3: what the data tells a group, a region and a country, and what every landing tells the airport about wear.

Page 3. Counts taken at the airport rather than estimates, for planning, development, climate and training.

Hosted in your region, by design

Nodes are live in Canada, the United States, Europe and Africa. Your data stays in-country, your backups with it, under the privacy law that applies to you. A partner in your market carries onboarding, training and support, with our engineering behind it. Each airport is locked to itself and every access is checked on the server and logged. Built for the smallest airport, with no analyst and no IT department, in thirteen languages.

Helicopter view page 4: hosted in your region, by design. Data held in-country, sold and supported locally, and where we are today.

Page 4. Four regions live, the third generation of a platform that has run real airports since 2019, on standard Linux and PostgreSQL.

What is coming: a new class of aircraft is already arriving

Small passenger aircraft for short regional hops, and cargo aircraft with nobody on board, are moving out of trials and into service. They fly frequent, short cycles, so they will use the fields big aviation has always passed over. At peak that is a movement a minute, each needing a permission, a record, a charge and an invoice. No airport on paper will land it. Being ready early is a commercial position, not a technology achievement, and the window is roughly two years. Read the full piece.

Helicopter view page 5: what is coming. One hour at a regional field today, and with the new class of aircraft at peak.

Page 5. One hour at a regional field, today and with the new class at peak: each mark is a movement that needs a permission, a record, a charge and an invoice.

Document two · the platform in detail

The product brochure

One trusted record for your airport. Capture each movement once, at source, and serve everyone who depends on it: the apron crew, the finance office, the executive, the authority and the customer.

How it works: one hub, captured once

Feeds from the apron, the tower, the cameras, the portal and your region's ADS-B network converge into one data spine that carries the aircraft registry, operations, the billing engine and the data warehouse, then fan out to the people and systems that depend on them, in near real time and held in-country.

The customer portal, live today

A self-service front door for every operator, flight school, charter and aircraft owner. Register once, get an instant landing-fee quote on your real tariff, declare intent to fly, request permits approved straight to a QR badge, and arrive with the paperwork already done.

Vision AI and geo-fenced zones

Computer-vision AI runs at the edge and inside the mobile app. It identifies aircraft by registration, logs every sighting, and feeds air-traffic and parking billing. Geo-fenced zones tell the platform where an aircraft is, so a stand, a hangar or an apron can be billed for what actually happened there.

One configurable rules engine

The same engine runs three jobs, all set up as data by your own administrators: billing rules, data enrichment and data cleaning. Change a rule, not the software. That is how one platform serves a towerless airfield and a national group alike.

One codebase, many archetypes

The same code presents as whatever you are: an operating airport, a group of airports, an air-navigation service provider or a civil aviation authority. From a tablet to a national group, on one foundation, with data held where you are.

Built for the airfield, not the office

The console on any screen, for the ops room, the tower, finance and commercial. The portal for pilots and operators: a quote on your real tariff, intent to fly, visitor permits approved to a QR code, their own aircraft and movements. The ops app on the apron: it reads the registration with the camera, works without signal, and captures movements, apron services, ground power and parking where they happen. And the cameras, watching the movements, counting the ones nobody wrote down.

Product brochure, the apps page: built for the airfield, not the office. The console, the portal, the ops app and the cameras.

Where the work happens: on the apron, at the gate, in the tower and in the ops room. The desk is optional.

At a prominent South African airport, Ironwood Aero helped management substantially increase revenue. Not by raising fees, but through cleaner data, flexible billing rules, and near-real-time visibility of everything moving on the airfield.

Airport management, a prominent South African airport. Reference letter on file.

Speaks your language

Set the airport's default language once. Every user can switch to their own.

EnglishFrançaisEspañolPortuguês DeutschItalianoNederlandsKiswahili AfrikaansisiZuluisiXhosaSepedi Português (Brasil)Shqip

Partner, not vendor. We prove the value on your apron before you scale it across your network.

Download the product brochure (PDF) → See it working

Document three · a brochure for each of the people who run aviation

Ironwood Aero for ...

One platform, shaped for the authority, the air navigation service, the airport, the group, the air force base and the adviser. Each brochure is one page on what you get, and one on the rules engine that makes it yours.

The Ironwood Aero solution suite: six audiences around one platform, IWA_HUB and the rules engine.

The complete solution suite

Every audience in one document, with the rules engine and IWA_HUB, the data spine behind them.

Download the solution suite (PDF) →
11 pages, about 3 MB.

Questions, or a walk-through for your team: [email protected]