MYFBO.com shut down on 31 August 2026, after more than 25 years. For the flight schools, flying clubs and FBOs that ran their scheduling, billing, maintenance and training records on it, the platform did not wind down gently — the account, the database and the export tools all went away on the same day.

If you are reading this, you are in one of two situations. Either you pulled your data out before the deadline and you are deciding where to put it, or you did not and you are working out what you have left. This article covers both, honestly, because the second situation is more common than anyone wants to admit and the advice for it is different.

Where you stand right now

If you downloaded your .bak file

You are in good shape. MYFBO let customers generate a database backup, and that file typically carries your member records, aircraft data, reservation history, billing and account balances, and student training history. It is a database dump rather than a friendly spreadsheet, so it is not something you can open and read — but everything you need is in there, and it can be extracted.

Two things to do today, before anything else. Put a second copy somewhere that is not the laptop it was downloaded to — cloud storage, an external drive, ideally both. And do not rename or modify it. This is now the only copy of your operating history that exists, and there is nobody to request another one from.

If you did not get your export

This is recoverable, but not from MYFBO. What you can rebuild, and where it lives:

• Aircraft maintenance records. These are the most important and the most likely to survive, because the legally required records are your logbooks and your A&P's files, not the software. Your maintenance shop holds work orders and signed entries. Start here.
• Student training records. A student's own logbook is their property and their copy is authoritative for their time and endorsements. Your instructors' logbooks cover the other side. For Part 141, your certificate-holder records and enrollment files exist outside the software by regulation.
• Account balances and billing history. Your payment processor holds every transaction it settled, usually exportable for several years. Your bank statements corroborate them. Between the two you can reconstruct balances, though not the invoice-level detail.
• Member contact details. Email confirmations, your mailing list, your insurance roster, and any accounting system that carried customers.
• Reservation history. Realistically, gone — and it matters least. It is useful for utilization analysis and nothing else.

The honest summary: you will likely recover compliance and financial records, and lose historical scheduling data. That is an annoying loss rather than an operational one. Do not let it delay picking a replacement.

What a gap in your records actually costs

Not all missing data is equal, and it is worth being clear about which gaps matter:

• Maintenance and airworthiness records — the only category that can ground an aircraft. Rebuild these first, from your shop and your logbooks.
• Training records and endorsements — a regulatory requirement for Part 141, and for Part 61 the thing that decides whether a student has to repeat work they already paid for. Second priority.
• Account balances — recoverable from your processor, but every day you operate without them is a day of billing you cannot reconcile later. Third.
• Member contact details — inconvenient, quickly rebuilt.
• Reservation and utilization history — nice to have. Let it go.

Work in that order and you will be operating normally far sooner than if you try to restore everything at once.

How Flight Suite HQ speeds up your migration

Flight Suite HQ was designed around one principle: your data belongs to you, and moving it should be easy — in and out. Whether you arrive with a complete MYFBO backup, a pile of processor exports and logbooks, or something in between, these are the paths in.

1. Member data

Your roster is the heart of the operation, and it is the fastest thing to restore. Bulk import brings pilots, students, instructors and staff across in minutes rather than one at a time. Names, emails, phone numbers, roles and membership status come through cleanly, and we will map fields for you when the source format does not line up — which, with a database export rather than a tidy CSV, it usually does not.

2. Aircraft and fleet records

Tail numbers, make and model, hourly rates, billing configuration, and the maintenance tracking that matters most: tach and Hobbs times, inspection intervals and due dates. Have your mechanic verify the times before you go live rather than an administrator — every maintenance calculation downstream is derived from them, and a number entered wrong on day one stays wrong.

3. Billing and account balances

The scariest part of any migration is losing track of who owes what. Account balances and billing history import so there is no gap in your financial records, and if you are rebuilding from processor exports rather than a platform backup, we will help you get opening balances agreed and signed off before you start invoicing. Get that agreement in writing from whoever does your books — reconciling it afterwards means reconstructing two systems at once.

4. Training and logbook history

For Part 141 and Part 61 operations these are regulatory requirements, not conveniences. Training assignments, lesson progress and logbook entries import, so students do not lose credit for work they have already completed and paid for. Where history is genuinely missing, drawing a line at a cutover date and keeping reconstructed records alongside is a legitimate and much cleaner approach than a bad partial import.

What makes Flight Suite HQ the right replacement

Migrating is one thing. Landing on a platform that is actually better than what you left is another. What you get:

• All-in-one operations platform — scheduling, billing, maintenance tracking, training management, charter operations and member communication in a single system, with no feature tiers
• Modern, mobile-friendly interface — members and instructors book flights, log time and pay invoices from any device
• Automated billing — invoices generated on check-in, with prepaid hours, membership tiers and autopay
• Compliance-ready — Part 141 stage checks, AC 120-78B electronic recordkeeping, TSA tracking, electronic signatures and AD compliance built in
• Transparent pricing — $15 per aircraft per month plus $0.50 per active user, published on the site, with every module included
• Real human support — during a migration you can talk to us directly

Flight Suite HQ turned what we thought would be a month-long migration into a long weekend. Our members barely noticed the switch.

The lesson worth taking from this

MYFBO gave its customers months of notice and a working export tool, and plenty of operators still lost their data — because the export was a task that could always be done next week, until the week ran out.

Whatever platform you land on next, MYFBO's closure or not, ask one question before you sign: can I export everything, myself, in a usable format, today, without asking anyone? Not "will you provide a copy on request" — that promise is only as good as the company making it, and the whole point of a shutdown is that the company is gone. Then actually do the export once a quarter and keep the file. It takes ten minutes and it is the difference between changing software and rebuilding your operation from logbooks.

If you want to see how the alternatives stack up before deciding, we keep a vendor-by-vendor comparison of eleven platforms with each one's published pricing — including the ones that are cheaper than we are.

Ready to make the switch?

If you came off MYFBO with a backup, we will get it imported. If you came off without one, we will help you work out what you have and rebuild in the order that gets you operating soonest. Either way, reach out and we will walk you through exactly how fast your migration can be.

Your data comes with you. Your members stay with you. And you can take it all back out again whenever you want.