Overview
Delegation lets you give other autorouter users controlled access to your aircraft, routes and flight plans — without ever sharing your login. Each pilot signs in with their own account and their own credentials, and sees only what you have granted them.
It was built for flying clubs, syndicates, group ownership, flight schools and small flight departments: one person maintains the aircraft, and everybody else flies it.
The most important property of delegation is what it does not allow. Aircraft configuration — weight and balance, performance data, equipment, registration — can never be delegated. It stays with the account that owns the aircraft, permanently and by design. Your pilots can plan and file with the aircraft; they cannot change a single setting on it.
Terminology
- The main account holder is the account that owns the aircraft and grants the access — typically the club’s head of flight operations. In the API this account is called the authorizer.
- A delegate is a pilot who has been granted access to the main account’s data.
Delegation is always granted individually, from one main account to one pilot, with its own set of rights. A pilot may hold delegations from several main accounts at the same time — for example from two different clubs.
What it looks like for the main account holder
You carry on using your account exactly as before. In addition:
- Your aircraft remain yours. Only you can change or delete them.
- Every route and flight plan your pilots create on your behalf belongs to your account. Your routes and flight plans lists therefore give you a single, complete overview of all club activity, with no need to ask anybody for a copy.
- You can optionally have your pilots receive the flight plan notifications (acceptance, rejection, slot messages, delays) for the flights they are involved in, so that routine traffic does not all land in your mailbox.
What it looks like for the pilot
The pilot registers a normal autorouter account and logs in with it. Once a delegation is in place:
- Your aircraft appear in the pilot’s Aircraft list, marked with a sharing symbol to show that access is by delegation rather than ownership.
- On the route request page a “Create route on behalf of” selector appears. The pilot chooses either Myself or your account, and plans as usual.
- When the pilot plans on your behalf, the resulting route — and any flight plan filed from it — is stored in your account.
- The pilot’s own private aircraft, routes and flight plans stay entirely separate and remain invisible to you.
What can be delegated
Each of the following can be granted or withheld individually, per pilot.
Aircraft
| Right | What the pilot can do |
|---|---|
| List aircraft | See your aircraft in their aircraft list. |
| Use aircraft | Open your aircraft and use it for route planning, briefing and flight plan filing. |
Routes
| Right | What the pilot can do |
|---|---|
| Create routes | Request routes on your behalf. The route is stored in your account. |
| List routes | See your routes in their routes list. |
| View routes | Open one of your routes, with the full briefing package. |
| Edit routes | Modify one of your routes. |
Flight plans
| Right | What the pilot can do |
|---|---|
| File flight plans | File a flight plan on your behalf. |
| List flight plans | See your flight plans in their flight plans list. |
| View flight plans | Open one of your flight plans and read its message history. |
| Cancel flight plans | Cancel one of your filed flight plans. |
| Delay / bring forward | Change the EOBT of one of your filed flight plans. |
| Departure and arrival messages | Send DEP and ARR messages, and SWM/RFI requests, for your flight plans. |
| Receive notifications | Receive the e-mail, SMS and Telegram notifications generated by your flight plans, in addition to you. |
A typical club pilot is given: list and use aircraft, create/list/view routes, and file/list/view flight plans together with cancel and delay. Rights such as editing routes or sending arrival messages are usually reserved for the flight operations team.
What can never be delegated
- Creating, changing or deleting aircraft. This is reserved for the owner of the aircraft and cannot be granted to anybody, under any combination of settings.
- Account settings — name, e-mail address, password, passkeys, notification preferences and subscription.
- Granting delegations. A pilot cannot pass their access on to a third party.
One point to be clear about: a pilot who may use your aircraft can also read its configuration, including weight and balance and performance figures, because that information is part of the flight preparation. Delegation makes the configuration unchangeable by your pilots; it does not make it invisible to them.
Delegation or a sharing code?
autorouter offers two different ways to let somebody else fly your aircraft, and they are easy to confuse.
- A sharing code (see Aircraft sharing) hands over a copy of the aircraft definition. The recipient ends up owning that copy, can change it freely, and your original is unaffected. Their flights appear in their account, not yours.
- Delegation gives live, read-only access to your aircraft, and collects the resulting routes and flight plans in your account.
If your goal is that pilots cannot alter the aircraft configuration, and that flight operations keeps the complete picture, delegation is the mechanism you want.
How to set it up
Delegation grants access to your data, so it is configured by autorouter support rather than from within the application. There is no way for anybody to grant themselves access to your account.
- Make sure every pilot has registered their own autorouter account, and collect the e-mail addresses they registered with.
- As the main account holder, log in and open a support ticket.
- In the ticket, state that you would like delegations set up on your account, and list for each pilot their registered e-mail address and the rights they should receive. If all pilots are to get the same rights, say so once — a list of e-mail addresses is enough.
- We configure the delegations and confirm in the ticket. The new access is available to your pilots immediately, next time they reload the site.
Please note that the request must come from the main account holder. We do not act on a request from a pilot asking to be given access to somebody else’s account.
Changing or removing access
Open a support ticket in the same way to add or remove individual rights, to add a new pilot, or to withdraw a pilot’s access completely — for instance when somebody leaves the club. Withdrawing access takes effect at once.
Routes and flight plans that a pilot created on your behalf are not affected: they were stored in your account from the outset and remain there.
Frequently asked questions
Do my pilots see each other’s flights?
Not through your delegation. Delegation runs between your account and one pilot at a time. A pilot sees your data and their own — never another pilot’s private data.
Can a pilot fly for two clubs?
Yes. Each club’s main account holder raises their own ticket, and the pilot then chooses the relevant account from the “Create route on behalf of” selector.
Can a pilot file a flight plan using their own aircraft as well?
Yes. Delegation adds access to your aircraft; it does not restrict anything the pilot already had in their own account.
What happens if I add a new aircraft later?
Delegated access applies to your account, not to individual aircraft, so a newly created aircraft becomes available to your pilots automatically. No further ticket is needed.