At this point in my flying, I had an Aircraft owners rarely enjoy watching prices climb, except at resale. Everywhere else in ownership, rising costs are just a tax on demand, labor shortages, and production constraints that show no sign of easing.
AI is starting to close some of those gaps. One place it’s landing is maintenance, repair, and overhaul, the operations that keep the world’s 5.2 billion annual passengers flying on airworthy aircraft.
A nascent leader in this space is Fleetcraft, a San Francisco-based, and now London-based, AI-driven MRO software company founded by two aerospace technicians, Finn Quinlan (CEO, satellite systems background) and Ammar Naseer (CTO, former QA at Manta Air). Fleetcraft’s mission is to give MRO teams a faster, more accurate way to document work, check inventory, and generate repair quotes, all through voice input.
Drawing on their backgrounds in aerospace quality assurance and regulatory compliance, and working with an advisory team of technicians across the industry, Finn and Ammar built AI tools for the shop floor rather than the back office.
“From Boeing’s 7,000 technician shortage to aircraft owners watching a $350,000 document check climb to $600,000,” Finn said, “we saw one place where we could reduce cost and pull time out of the process: the slow, paper-heavy MRO workflow.”
Using Fleetcraft’s voice-to-log feature, a technician notes a discrepancy or squawk by phone, lapel mic, or smart glasses, and keeps working. Fleetcraft processes that voice data through its aviation-specific model and returns a squawk entry with a 98% first-pass acceptance rate, meaning technicians only need to correct or add to it about 2% of the time. The mechanic reviews the entry, adds anything the system flagged as missing, such as a part number, and passes it to a crew supervisor.
Fleetcraft can also match that shop floor entry against on-site or supplier inventory and generate a change order off the shop’s flat rate records, or fold it into an existing quote.
Finn’s team has worked across the US and Europe onboarding MROs and Part 145 repair stations, a process that runs roughly four weeks depending on the organization.
To guard against AI hallucination in a compliance-driven environment, Fleetcraft doesn’t let the model produce final statements on its own. A human still reviews and signs off on every entry, but the review takes a fraction of the time of the traditional process: stop work, walk to a kiosk or laptop, type it in, walk back.
On data handling, Fleetcraft maintains zero data retention with its LLM providers, and EU and US customers can request data residency in their own compute jurisdiction.
“Much of the software running MROs and Part 145 shops today is 15-plus years old,” Finn said. “A lot of that legacy software also holds a facility’s data hostage. The entry process, the inventory checks, all of it is slow, and it locks you into their system.”
“What we’re offering is a way to link existing repair data and systems with real-time inventory awareness, so quotes are accurate and fast,” Finn added. “That’s where the efficiency and cost reduction come from.”
Asked whether Fleetcraft’s goal is reducing headcount, Finn said the tool is built to streamline the identification and documentation work that eats up technicians’ non-wrench time, not replace the technicians doing it. Paired with better inventory visibility, shops are also seeing fewer delays tied to late parts orders.
Whether the labor savings, inventory transparency, and quoting speed are enough to slow the climbing cost of keeping an aircraft airworthy is still an open question. The industry will find out as more shops adopt tools like this one, and may even determine where a customer goes if Fleetcraft means lower operating costs.
