The flight lands. The school already knows.
MasterPilot's app is the cockpit: it records, replays, and grades the flying. That half is the client's. We built the back office: the portal where schools run licenses, people, fleet, and campuses, and the pipeline that carries every flight from webhook to inbox.
What we built, and what we didn't
MasterPilot is not our product. We were brought in for the portal that runs the schools: management, reporting, and the automation behind them. This page covers that build, and nothing else.
Everything existed. Nothing was connected.
The app graded every flight in the air. On the ground, the school ran on manual lists, separate campus systems, and licenses that died with every departure.
Licenses walked out the door
Every seat was glued to a person. When someone left, the seat left with them.
Every campus was an island
People lived in manual lists. Aircraft had no link to the school. Each location ran its own system.
No system knew the school
The app knew the flights. The lists knew the people. Nothing put quality, activity, and spend in one place.
What happens when a flight lands
The app and the portal are separate systems with no shared database. Webhooks carry everything both ways. From the moment a flight lands, nothing waits on a person.
- 01
Before the flight
The portal has already shaped this cockpit: license, role, course, and fleet, pushed over webhooks.
- 02
The webhook fires
The flight arrives at the portal endpoint, alone or in a batch.
- 03
Saved before parsed
The raw payload writes to ApiWebhookLog before a single field is read.
- 04
The job runs
A dedup key, three attempts, a status state machine. Failure means replay, not loss.
- 05
Reports refresh
Hours, scores, and medals land in 13 pre-computed cache tables; a dirty flag marks what must recompute.
- 06
The mail goes out
An email per processed flight, each carrying an idempotency key; a distributed lock keeps the cron from sending twice.
The parse can be wrong. The record never is.
Eight screens a flight school runs on
The portal is the back office, the app is the cockpit. No shared database, webhooks in both directions. We built the back office. These are its eight screens. Pick one.
Every instructor on one board.
The whole faculty, their student load and hours flown, sortable in a single view.
Campus scope guards run on every mutation, so one campus never sees another.
Nobody spammed, nobody forgotten
A master switch stops everything. Per person toggles and bulk controls tune it. Every user can opt out per email type. The automation runs itself; the owner holds the remote.
One row per email, an idempotency key on each, a distributed lock on the cron, and a circuit breaker when a provider fails. Postmark and AWS SES carry the mail.
Six decisions we would defend in review
Not a feature list. These are the engineering calls behind the portal, and the reasoning we would give if you challenged each one in review.
A job queue in the database
Not Redis, not SQS. Dedup keys, three attempts, a status machine, one less system to operate.
Log the payload before parsing it
Every flight lands raw in a webhook log first. If processing fails, we replay from the raw record.
Licenses belong to the school
When someone leaves, the seat returns to the pool and is reassigned. No departure wastes a seat.
Reports read from cache first
13 pre-computed tables return instantly. TTL plus a dirty flag set by mutations keeps them current.
Passwordless login, magic links only
No passwords are stored anywhere, so there is nothing to steal, nothing to leak, nothing to reset.
Scope guards on every mutation
Each campus is walled off and every write is checked. Data cannot leak between campuses.
RESULTThe school runs from here
The portal is the back office: licenses, roles, fleet, and campuses are set once, and every cockpit follows. We shipped it across ten releases, and it has run in production since March 2026.
WEBHOOK SYNC · EMAIL ENGINE
Everything exists. Is it connected?
Most teams do not need another system. They need the ones they already pay for to talk to each other. Tell us which two of yours still do not, on a free 20 minute call.