Sky Duty vs MyFlightbook: Modern Flight Management

Why this comparison matters

MyFlightbook is a hard product to argue against on price. It is free, it covers Android and the web alongside iOS, and it has been around long enough to build a community of more than a hundred thousand pilots filing entries every week. For a student pilot or an owner-operator with one tail who logs once a week and never needs anything beyond a clean place to record hours and currency, MyFlightbook is a reasonable place to stop and the per-aircraft Sky Duty subscription is hard to justify on the budget. The comparison gets sharper when the operation has more moving parts. An owner running a Cirrus and a Piper, or a small Part 91 department with two crews and an outside maintenance vendor, runs into limits on the free side fast: no Gantt scheduling for the fleet, no squawk routing from the post-flight screen, no receipt scanning that ties a fuel slip to a tail and a trip, no per-aircraft profile with Hobbs and tach tracking, and no native iOS experience that behaves the same way offline as online. Sky Duty trades the free price tag and the Android client for a tool built around running an operation rather than recording one. The web wrapper that makes MyFlightbook portable across platforms is also what keeps it from feeling at home on an iPad in a maintenance hangar with no cell signal, and that is the practical trade a small department has to evaluate honestly when the day-to-day workflow has to keep moving without WiFi, without a steady cellular connection, and without a desktop computer to fall back on. The other moment a department reconsiders is when revenue trips begin and pilots have to bill back fuel, landing fees, and per-leg expenses against a specific tail and customer. The free logbook tracks the hours; it does not pull the receipt off the iPhone camera, attach it to the right leg, and roll it into a quarterly export the bookkeeper can reconcile. That work happens elsewhere or it does not happen at all, and the cost of doing it elsewhere is what tips a small operator over to a paid operations app once the volume justifies it.