Structured Aviation Authoring

Aviation operators manage large sets of controlled manuals, procedures, bulletins, and training documents that are revised by different teams over time. A single change can affect several related documents, require multiple approvals, apply only to certain fleets or bases, and still need a complete record of who approved it, when it became effective, and who received it. Many operators manage this work across Word, PDFs, SharePoint, email, and spreadsheets, making revision state, references, approvals, and distribution difficult to keep aligned.

I led the product design of TrustFlight’s structured authoring system and contributed to its front end. We designed the product around the full lifecycle of a controlled document, from import and authoring through amendment, approval, publication, and distribution. Document types carried the rules for metadata, permissions, retention, and publication, while the same document could still be organised in different ways by fleet, base, type, or collection. Existing PDFs could be brought under control without full conversion, while documents that needed deeper editing could be imported into a structured format or created directly in the system.

Most of my work centred on the editor and the revision workflow. Aviation manuals can run to hundreds of pages, so the editor had to preserve numbering, references, tables, revision history, and regulatory structure while several people worked across the same document. I designed variables and generated elements such as tables of contents and lists of effective pages so repeated information stayed consistent, and linked regulations directly into the authoring environment so changes could be traced back to the procedures they affected. Amendments were created from the current published version, with changes compared inline or side by side before being routed through review. Distribution then carried the approved revision to the relevant roles, fleets, or bases and tracked acknowledgement.

The product was used to manage large aviation manuals and existing document libraries while we continued improving the technical foundation. The main limitation was the browser itself. Manuals of five to seven hundred pages exposed problems around pagination, rendering stability, memory use, large tables, and PDF fidelity, and imported legacy documents often still needed remediation after conversion. Those constraints remained some of the hardest parts of the system even after the broader workflow was in use.