Skycall 🎈: the dawn call, made automatically

An AI-powered operations brain for hot-air balloon operators, wrapped in a cinematic, living website. Tomorrow’s forecast comes in, the call gets made, and every passenger hears about it, with nobody working the phones.

Every balloon operator knows the feeling: it’s 6 pm and the forecast just changed. The pilot is reading wind at three heights while dozens of passengers set alarms for 4 am. Then the phone tree starts: voicemails, the wrong hotel, a family that flew halfway around the world, told at midnight. Tomorrow evening, the same again. Skycall turns that whole evening into one automated flow, so a small operator can run like a big one.

The problem: dawn flights live or die on the wind, and every “no” lands on a person with a phone. Rebooking is done by hand, empty seats go unfilled, and reviews blame the operator for the sky. The decision belongs to the pilot. The messaging shouldn’t eat their evening.

The solution:

The evening call. At 18:00 Skycall reads tomorrow’s forecast at the surface, 80 m and 180 m, checks it against the operator’s own limits, and calls it GO, HOLD or NO-GO, with the reasons in plain English.

Every passenger told automatically. Each one gets an email with the verdict, meeting point, what to wear and a calendar link.

The dawn recheck. Two hours before launch it looks again, and only writes if the sky changed.

One-tap rebooking. A no comes with two flyable dates, one tap each. Quiet after 24 h? A reminder. Still quiet? Pencilled onto the next flyable dawn.

Waitlist seat fill. On a GO with empty seats, the waitlist gets a 45-minute offer, and the first tap wins.

The crew manifest. The pilot’s phone shows passengers, basket load against the maximum, a hot-dawn warning and the hotel pickup order.

A Monday digest for the owner, plus a public ops log where every automated run is on the record.

A live demo console where anyone can run the call on any sky and watch it happen.

Built on Base44: 15 entities and 21 backend functions sharing one rules engine. The forecast comes live from Open-Meteo, and scheduling runs via an external cron hitting a Base44 backend function. This build runs a demo operator: the operator and bookings are demo data, and the passenger emails go to a demo inbox. The forecast, the decisions and the sends are real.

Skycall is a planning aid. Every verdict is advisory, and the pilot in command decides.

🔗 Skycall

Really interesting concept! The best part is that this goes beyond weather alerts and automates the entire operational workflow, from flight decisions and passenger notifications to rebooking and waitlists. Keeping the final decision with the pilot is an especially important touch. Great use of automation!

I literally had to launch my website behind my own back 😭💻

As a brand designer, I kept finding one more thing to tweak before going live. A font, a layout, another section… the list never ended.

But building with @Base44 reminded me that launching doesn't mean you're finished. It means you've started.

✨ Here's what I built:

🌐 BrandingbyEl Website: A fully designed, published, mobile-responsive website that I can continue improving as my business grows.

🔗 https://brandingbyel.ca

🚀 Before The Launch (BTL) : A brand clarity tool. It helps founders work through their ideas, identify gaps, and get clearer on their brand before working with a designer.

🔗 https://brandingbyel.ca/before-the-launch

My biggest takeaway? Progress deserves to be published, too.

Both projects are live, and I'm excited to keep building, learning, and improving along the way.

Built with Base44 🖤

Haha felt this so hard! As designers we are never 100% satisfied, always one more tweak. You did the right thing launching — done is better than perfect. Congrats on finally going live!