Ground Segment
Planning, commanding and operating aircraft, and keeping the airworthiness record that proves how they were operated.
Mission planning, telemetry and command
Operators need to plan against real terrain and airspace, fly with live telemetry and payload control, and keep an operational record.
Free ground stations are engineer-facing, single-aircraft, and assume the operator is also the developer. They handle neither multi-aircraft operations nor the record-keeping an operations manual requires.
Planning against terrain, airspace and the aircraft's own performance model from Planform, so an infeasible plan is rejected before the crew travels. Live operation supports multiple aircraft under one picture, and every flight writes a structured record rather than a log file.
A corridor inspection where the performance model rejected a planned sortie as beyond endurance at the forecast headwind, an abort that otherwise happens at the halfway point.
Fleet operations and airworthiness
Continuing airworthiness: maintenance intervals, component life, defect history, pilot currency, and the records that prove all of it.
Fleets outgrow spreadsheets around ten aircraft. Component histories follow parts across airframes, maintenance is driven by hours and cycles held in another system, and currency depends on flights recorded somewhere else again. The reconciliation is manual and therefore wrong.
Flight records arrive from Sortie automatically, so hours, cycles and component life advance without anyone entering them. Maintenance and currency are computed rather than tracked, and components carry their history across airframes.
A twenty-two aircraft operation where three airframes were flying past a service interval: visible in the data, invisible in the spreadsheet everyone was reading.
Tell us what you are flying and where the programme is losing time. We will tell you honestly which of these helps and which does not.