Air Maestro
Air Maestro
Rethinking the experience of a mission-critical aviation platform at the wireframe level — turning two decades of dense safety, operations and fatigue capability into clear, calm, scannable screens.
Mission-critical software shouldn't feel like work.
Air Maestro is a long-established aviation platform that uniquely brings safety, operational and fatigue management into one system — trusted by airlines, medical, government, energy and charter operators worldwide, where a missed expiry or buried report can have real consequences.
That power came with density. My role was to work at the wireframe level — information architecture, flows and low-fidelity screens — to restructure the experience before any visual design, so the bones were right: clear hierarchy, obvious next steps, and safety status you can read at a glance.
Designing for high stakes
Reduce noise without removing the detail safety demands.
One mental model across very different modules.
Status that reads instantly — current, due, overdue.
When the stakes are safety, clarity isn't a nicety — it's the job.
Fix the bones first.
The existing product earned its place through depth — but years of features had layered into dense, grid-heavy screens that asked a lot of every user. Rushing to visuals would only repaint that complexity.
So I stayed deliberately low-fidelity. Wireframes strip away colour and polish and force the real questions: what belongs on this screen, in what order, and what's the one thing the user came to do? Get the hierarchy and flow right in grey, and the visual layer becomes easy.
Grey-box screens that get the structure right.
Representative wireframes of the core modules, recreated here to document the structural thinking. Status colour (green / amber / red) is intentional — in a safety tool, state is information.
Operations & safety dashboard
KPI tiles surface the few numbers that drive action — open reports, overdue items, compliance.
An open-reports list ranks by severity with a colour-coded status dot on every row.
A persistent left rail keeps safety, ops, fatigue and training one click apart.
Safety report submission
A single, linear form — type, when, where, severity, what happened — with no hunting.
Severity uses a segmented control so the critical field is one tap, not a dropdown.
A workflow rail shows where the report sits: submitted → review → investigation → closed.
Crew qualifications register
A scannable table with a status chip per person: current, due, or expired.
Filters sit above the table so narrowing to "expiring soon" is immediate.
The same status language as the dashboard — learn it once, use it everywhere.
Four principles for a high-stakes tool.
Legible
Hierarchy first. The eye lands on what matters before anything else.
Unified
One layout language across safety, ops and fatigue — learn it once.
Status-first
Current, due, overdue —
state is information,
shown consistently.
Trustworthy
Calm, predictable patterns that earn confidence in critical moments.
From cockpit-grade complexity to a clear line of sight.
Where it goes next
Validate with operators
Wireframes are a hypothesis. The next step is testing the safety-report and roster flows with real safety managers and crew, against the regulatory realities they work under.
Wireframes → design system
Carry the agreed structure into a high-fidelity component library, so safety, ops and fatigue stay visually and behaviourally consistent at scale.
The field, not just the desk
Much of aviation happens away from a desk. Designing the mobile and low-connectivity experience is essential for reporting and checks in the moment.
The platform today
Air Maestro is now part of Vellox Group, the unified aviation software platform.
Keep snooping →