The story of Western Airways

The story

Western Airways in Texas has been providing global charter flights since 1974. Founded by Captain George A. Dodge, the company began as a single-aircraft, single-pilot operation. Western Airways has since grown into one of the largest and most respected charter and management companies in the U.S. Aircraft types from turboprops to mid-size business jets to a 30-passenger regional jet are available for charter. With the highest standards of safety, Western Airways maintains the Argus Platinum Rating for Charter Operators and IS-BAO (International Standard for Business Aircraft Operations) Certification.

Western Airways has provided iPads to flight crews as EFBs (Electronic Flight Bags) in order to avail flight charts and work-specific apps to each crewmember. The technical administrator at Western Airways needed a solution to keep track of the devices. The primary requirements were to push apps and company documents to the crew member devices, track device location, distribute apps via Apple’s Volume Purchase Program (VPP), and wipe the device data remotely in case of emergency.

The technical team began looking for Mobile Device Management solutions in the market, evaluating most of the popular vendors. Many product interfaces seemed overly complex and time-consuming for what was needed. After signing up with Hexnode, the team found the interface to be quite simple to set up and was able to configure it in no time. The uncluttered and organized UI made it possible to navigate and understand things quickly and easily.

With Hexnode, the apps could be remotely pushed to all the devices or the selected devices from the MDM console. The admin could make apps mandatory and discover if the device has installed the mandatory app or not. There was also an option to blacklist and whitelist the apps, where installing a blacklisted app would make the device non-compliant. Creating app groups made the app deployment easier since the apps were dedicated to a specific group of devices.

Hexnode UEM had a detailed location tracking feature, which enabled the admin to track the location of the devices at specified time intervals and also view the location history of the device. The solution allowed fetching location manually whenever needed. The location history report could be downloaded from the console.

Apple’s Volume Purchase Program could be easily configured from the UEM console. Integration with VPP helped in distributing the purchased apps to the devices. For the devices which run on iOS 9 or higher, the apps could be installed directly without sending an invitation first. VPP also supported silent app installation on Supervised devices which requires no intervention from the user while installing the application, making app management more efficient.

Due to the importance of all the data in the iPads deployed to the flight crews, an option to wipe the device when needed was a crucial criterion in case a device was lost or compromised. With Hexnode’s remote management functionalities, the device could be wiped or locked remotely. The basic device management functions like remote wipe, lock, clear passcode, clear activation lock, app install as well as advanced features like policies and restrictions helped in managing the devices to the fullest capacity.

In a nutshell

The Western Airways team was immensely satisfied with Hexnode. They could rightly ensure security for their devices while allowing for easy, cost-effective device management with the implementation of Hexnode UEM. Hexnode’s robust solution was able to fulfil all their requirements in the best possible way.