Support and user guide

Questions, a problem to report, or a change you would like: write to gm@airspeed-services.com. Please say which device and which app version you are on — the version is at the foot of the Settings tab.

What the app is for

Gendec prepares the General Declaration required by Annex 9 to the Convention on International Civil Aviation, Appendix 1 — the document handed to border and customs authorities on arrival and departure. It keeps the reference lists — aircraft, aerodromes, crew, passengers — checks the flight file against the rules, and produces an A4 PDF.

Getting started

1. Settings › Aerodromes & sites — add the aerodromes and landing sites you operate from: two letters of a code bring up the built-in world directory, or import them from a CSV. Each one carries its time zone: that is what lets the app work out UTC from the local time the crew reads off the clock.
2. Settings › Aircraft — add each aircraft with its operator. The same registration may be listed twice when the airframe flies under two AOCs.
3. People — add the crew and the passengers, once. They are reusable from one flight to the next, and a passport can be read off a photograph or a copy rather than typed.
4. Flight — pick the aircraft, fill in the contact details, declare the inward leg, the outward leg or both, then place people on the flight.
5. GENDEC — once the banner reads READY, create the PDF and share it.

Sending a handling request

The Handling tab writes the e-mail you send to a handler, an FBO or a hotel. A request belongs to a site, not to a flight: a day's flying produces one e-mail per place visited, and a single e-mail can carry two visits to the same pad.

Choose the site and the recipients — they come from the site's own contacts — then the aircraft, the services, and the arrivals and departures with their local times and persons on board. The banner at the top says what is still missing; when it is green, Read it over and send shows the finished message. Compose in Mail hands it to whichever mail app the device uses, with recipients and subject already filled in, and you press send yourself. Copy request is there for a mail app that shortens a long message.

The aircraft's type, ICAO designator, landing gear and MTOW come from its own record, and the company to invoice from its operator — correct them once and every later request is right. Swipe a request to duplicate it: these e-mails repeat week after week, changing only the dates.

Section 6 — Animals on board carries the animals over from the flight being prepared, and the e-mail names them under the people, never among them: a dog arriving is a vet and a customs officer for the handler to arrange. They are a copy taken at that moment, not a pointer to the flight — correct the animal on the Flight screen and take it over again, so that what the handler was told cannot be rewritten behind their back.

The payment field holds a label only — Visa card, Fuel card. Gendec cannot store a card number, and one should never be sent by e-mail: give it over the telephone, or through the handler's own payment link.

Landing somewhere that has no ICAO code

A site is either an aerodrome, identified by its four-letter code, or a landing site — a hotel, an estate, a field — identified by its name and the town it sits in. Both carry a time zone, both can be used on a flight, and both print on the declaration: the aerodrome by its code, the landing site by its name. Choose which when you create the record.

Adding an aerodrome without typing it

Every aerodrome and heliport in the world travels inside the app — 21,853 of them, 2,911 being heliports — so there is usually nothing to type but the code. In an aerodrome's own screen, two characters are enough to bring up suggestions; choosing one fills in the code, the name and the time zone: every site in the directory carries one. In the search field of the site list, stations that are not yet on file appear under From the world directory, and one tap files them.

The time zone is measured, not guessed. Each site's position is tested against the official IANA time-zone boundaries when the directory is built, so a station in a state that keeps several of them still arrives with the right one: Fort St John gets America/Dawson_Creek, which is neither Vancouver's clock nor Edmonton's. Twenty-five offshore helidecks lie too far out to sea for any boundary to reach, and take the zone of their own state; three — two Antarctic field camps and an uninhabited atoll — carry none, and you set the zone on the record. Anywhere the app has never heard of is added by hand, or imported from a CSV, and works exactly the same afterwards.

Scanning a passport, or importing a copy

On any crew or passenger record, Scan the passport photographs the page and reads the two lines of code printed along its foot — the machine-readable zone. Those lines, and not the printed page above them, are what the app reads: they carry check digits, so the app can tell whether it read them correctly.

Nothing is written into the record straight away. A review sheet shows every value, what it replaces, and marks in amber any field whose check digit did not match — usually one character misread, and obvious against the passport in your hand. You decide whether to keep them. The place of birth is in no machine-readable zone and is still typed by hand. The photograph is read on the device and is never saved or sent anywhere.

A copy does just as well as the passport itself. Import a copy takes a PDF or a photograph out of Files — what an agent sends the evening before — and reads it exactly the same way, through the same review sheet. It does not matter which way up the passport was laid on the scanner, nor whether the copy is in colour. The file is read where it sits and is never copied into the app.

Crew that always fly together

People › Crew › Teams saves a crew once, with the function of each member. On the Flight screen the crew section offers Add from records for one person at a time and Add a saved team for the whole crew, which places everyone with their function already set. Anyone already on the flight is left alone, and a function you chose by hand is never overwritten.

Travel documents about to expire

A banner at the top of the People lists reports documents that have expired and those expiring within ninety days, counted from today rather than from the flight you are preparing. Tap it to see only those records, tap again to see everyone. The check that blocks a declaration is unchanged and still measured against the flight date — this is simply the same fact, seen early enough to renew a passport in time.

Crew licences, ratings and medicals

A crew record carries the licence number, the medical certificate, the operator proficiency check, a type rating for each machine the person may fly, and a language proficiency entry for each language spoken. Every date is optional. They behave exactly like the aircraft's own papers — a seal beside the row when one has run out or is within ninety days of it, a line on the flight's status card when that person is on the flight, and nothing blocked. A paperwork reminder has no business standing between a crew and a document that has to be handed over at the aircraft steps.

A licence issued under Part-FCL has no expiry, and the app does not pretend otherwise: what runs out is the rating on the type, which the LPC renews. Write the rating the way the licence writes it — AW139, not the A139 of ICAO Doc 8643 — and the aircraft's own record lists the crew rated on it. A language at level 6 is issued for life; the switch marked Does not expire records that, and an entry marked so is never counted as needing renewal.

If your crew-records system already follows these dates, leave them empty. Two records of one date disagree eventually, and it is the one in the wrong place that gets believed.

Animals in the cabin

Section 4 — Animals on board on the Flight screen takes dogs, cats and anything else alive back there. Each one has its own screen: what it is, the animal's name, the pet passport number, the microchip number — fifteen digits under ISO 11784/11785 — and the date the rabies vaccination runs out. Anything that is not a dog or a cat carries its own word, which is what prints.

They are never counted as passengers. The declaration gives them a list of their own, headed live animals on board (not counted as passengers), and the figures in the header go on counting people. A dog added to the passenger count is a difference between the document and the people who walk off the aircraft.

What blocks the declaration is what the document prints: an animal with no name, no species, or on no declared leg. What is only reported is the rest — a rabies vaccination that has run out or is within ninety days of it, and an animal recorded with neither of its two numbers. Rabies is what stops an animal at a border, but an app that refused to print over it would hold up the whole aircraft.

Duplicating a flight brings the animals with it, chip number and all: a rotation that repeats repeats with the same dog. A handling request created from that flight carries them too, and names them in the e-mail.

How long issued declarations are kept

A declaration kept after it was issued holds the passport numbers it printed, and goes on holding them after the records they came from are gone. Settings › Keep them for sets how long that lasts: ninety days, six months, a year, or everything until you say otherwise. Anything past its period is erased when the app next opens.

It keeps everything until you choose a period, so that updating the app never quietly erases a history you were relying on. When you do choose one, the app tells you how many declarations it is about to erase before it erases them — that cannot be undone.

Tools

The sums a crew does before a flight, on one screen: at the top of Settings, and behind the spanner on the Flight screen. Nothing on it is saved — it is a calculator, opened, read and left.

Distance is great-circle, between any two places the app knows a position for: your own landing sites, and every aerodrome and heliport in the directory, each of which carries one. An aerodrome you have on file needs no position of its own — the app reads it off the directory entry of the same code. It answers in nautical miles and kilometres with the initial track, and it is a planning figure and not a route: it knows nothing of airways, danger areas, terrain or wind, and the track it gives is the one to leave on, which a great circle changes all the way along.

Flight time is the wind triangle: distance, track, true airspeed and the wind written the way it was given — 270/25, 27025, or the field left blank for calm — and in return the heading to steer, the ground speed, the head- and crosswind components and the time en route. One tap takes the distance and the track from the two places chosen above. A crosswind stronger than the aircraft flies, or a headwind at least equal to the airspeed, is said in words rather than covered with a number.

Fuel planning adds up the block line by line — taxi, trip, contingency, alternate and final reserve — at the fuel flow you give, in whichever of the five units you give it. Every reserve is a figure you type: the app names none of its own, and what the arithmetic leaves out — climb, descent, holding, routing, the wind aloft — is written under the section.

There gives the time at the other end, ticking, and what the sun does there on the day you choose: sunrise, sunset and civil twilight, the one that matters at a pad with no lighting. Inside the polar circles it says the sun does not set, or does not rise, rather than inventing an hour.

Fuel and mass converts between kilogrammes, pounds, litres, US gallons and imperial gallons in any direction. The density is asked for rather than hidden inside the arithmetic, and the field arrives empty like every other — one tap on Use 0.80, the planning figure fills it — because a density is a measurement and not a constant: Jet A-1 runs from about 0.775 to 0.840 kg/L with the batch and its temperature, which is four hundred kilogrammes on a five-tonne uplift. 0.80 is what a flight plan is worked on; the real figure is on the delivery note.

Position reads a position back three ways — decimal for a map, degrees, minutes and seconds off a chart, degrees and decimal minutes for a flight management system or a permit form — however it was typed.

CSV import and export

Every list imports and exports as CSV, and the export writes exactly the columns the import reads, so a file taken off one device loads onto another. Columns are found by the names in the header row, so a file exported by an older version still loads correctly; a file with no header row is read in the order below.

• Sites — icao,name,time zone, and optionally the kind, the town, the country, the position and the contacts. The zone is an IANA identifier such as Europe/Paris; it may be left empty, in which case both local and UTC times are typed by hand. Leave the first cell empty for a landing site. A first cell that is filled but is not a four-letter code is refused — that is a typing mistake, not a hotel.
• Aircraft — registration,operator, and optionally the type, the ICAO type designator, the licence type rating, the landing gear, the MTOW in kilogrammes, the certificate of registration number and the ARC, insurance and registration expiries.
• Crew and passengers — surname,given names,date of birth,sex,place of birth,document type,nationality,issuing country,document number,expiry. Nationality and issuing country may be written as a three-letter code (FRA), a two-letter code (FR) or a country name (France); all three are filed as the three-letter code the declaration prints. A value that names no country is kept exactly as it was written rather than discarded. Six further columns follow for crew — licence expiry,medical expiry,proficiency expiry,licence number,type ratings,languages — and a file written without them simply leaves what the device already holds. The two lists fit in one cell each: AW139:2027-05-31|AS350 and English:6:never|Italian:4:2027-05-12, entries separated by a bar rather than a semicolon, which a spreadsheet may already be using to separate its columns.

Dates are read as YYYY-MM-DD, and also as 11/10/1967, 11-10-1967, 11.10.1967 or 11-OCT-1967. A date that cannot exist is refused rather than shifted to a neighbouring day. A person already on file with the same document number is updated, not duplicated.

A row is only accepted if it carries a surname and a sex. The manifest has two values for sex and no third one, so a blank cell cannot be filed without inventing the answer — the row is refused instead, the rest of the file imports normally, and the result says how many were left out.

The declaration will not let me issue it

That is deliberate: the banner names the reason in plain language. The usual ones are a person whose record is incomplete, no pilot-in-command designated, someone listed with neither an inbound nor an outbound movement, a movement declared on a leg that has not been declared, an animal with no name, or a travel document that has expired on the flight date. Clear the point named and the banner turns green.

The outward destination is not decided yet

Switch on Destination to be notified on the departure leg. The declaration then prints TO BE NOTIFIED in the destination field instead of naming an aerodrome, and the flight file passes its checks.

Times

Enter the local time at the station — where the aircraft lands on the inward leg, where it takes off on the outward one. UTC is calculated from the aerodrome's time zone, correctly across daylight saving changes, and the screen flags the case where UTC falls on a different day. Without a time zone on that aerodrome, both times are entered by hand.

Privacy and data

Everything stays on the device: no account, no server, no analytics — the passport scan and any copy you import included, both of which use the device's own text recognition and keep nothing. The app can require Face ID, Touch ID or the device passcode each time it opens. Settings › Delete all local data erases everything immediately. The full policy is in the privacy policy.

Reporting a problem

Write to gm@airspeed-services.com with what you did, what you expected and what happened instead. If it concerns a document that came out wrong, the PDF itself is the most useful thing to attach — but remember it carries passenger data, so send it only if you are content for it to travel by e-mail.