--- title: "Aviation Business Podcast interview: Why Intuos treats Aircraft as Assets" url: https://intuos.aero/news/aviation-business-podcast-interview/ date: 2026-09-07 modified: 2026-09-08 author: "Staff" description: "A shift in perspective Intuos CEO Carolina Gianardi looks at a flight school first also as an asset management operation, and not only as a training organization. That's the thesis..." categories: - "News" image: https://intuos.aero/intuos/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/us-aviation-podcast-1024x576.jpg word_count: 600 --- # Aviation Business Podcast interview: Why Intuos treats Aircraft as Assets ### A shift in perspective Intuos CEO Carolina Gianardi looks at a** flight school first also as an asset management operation, and not only as a training organization**. That's the thesis she lays out in this conversation with **Tim Jedrek** on the **Aviation Business Podcast**.  ### The number most schools never calculate The reasoning starts with a figure many schools have never precisely worked out: the optimal utilization range for an aircraft. Intuos' CEO puts the healthy range at **600 to 800 flight hours a year**, roughly **50 to 67 hours a month**. It isn't a ceiling to push toward at all costs, but a balance: exceed it, and rising extraordinary maintenance costs can quietly cancel out the revenue those extra hours generated. It's the distinction, she explains, between maximizing utilization and optimizing it.   ### Telemetry without touching the avionics That balance is where Intuos' technology comes in: **plug-and-play devices that capture flight telemetry** — GPS, pitch, roll, yaw — and transmit it to the ground in real time, without being connected to the aircraft's avionics. Because they don't interface with the aircraft's systems, these devices fall under **EASA CS-STAN** as a standard change, with no Supplemental Type Certificate required: a non-trivial detail for operators weighing installation without wanting to navigate a full certification process.   ### When the system actually pays off Carolina is clear on when technology becomes **[a game changer for flight schools](https://intuos.aero/solutions/flight-schools-aeroclub/)**: **the tipping point comes above eight aircraft, when spreadsheets and scheduled maintenance alone stop being enough**, and real KPIs need to be tracked: hours of availability, hours of utilization, reasons for cancellations, extraordinary maintenance.   ### A real case: the flap motor story On that last point, she and the interviewer share a telling example: a **school kept replacing the flap motor on the same aircraft**, until the flight data revealed that a single instructor was deploying flaps past the white arc on every final approach: a pattern invisible flight by flight, but obvious once the data is aggregated over time.   ### The debrief isn't a courtroom There's also a theme Intuos' CEO approaches with some care: how this data gets communicated back to instructors. The risk, she says, is that **monitoring gets perceived as a control mechanism rather than a growth tool.** That's why she insists on one point: reviewing data with the team shouldn't resemble a judicial process, but a peer-to-peer conversation. Her practical advice for schools not yet ready to invest in hardware is to start here: standardize the debrief process between instructor and student. **It's a way to transfer safety culture across the whole team without policing each instructor individually.**   ### The ROI that doesn't show up in a slide On the return on investment, Carolina notes an interesting cultural difference: American operators press for ROI far more insistently than their European counterparts.  The reason it's hard to answer, she explains, is that the benefit rarely shows up in the revenue line. It shows up elsewhere — in back-office time saved (**customers report roughly 20 minutes of admin per flight** on manual logbook entries alone, time that disappears with automatic data integration), and in a more differentiated experience for the student, who can review their own flight instead of relying on the instructor's memory. But above all, says Intuos' CEO, the most significant ROI is the one hardest to put on a slide: **the maintenance costs that simply never happen**. Carolina and the Intuos team will be at the [**Ascend Flight Training Summit in Dallas, September 8–10**](https://intuos.aero/news/ascend-summit-2026/). Watch the full conversation above, or **[book a call](https://intuos.aero/contact/)** to see the platform applied to your fleet.