Session continuity layer for legacy MRO terminals

A dispatcher or planner is mid-way through logging a deferred defect or updating a task card when the application either freezes for 45 seconds or silently logs them out — a specific complaint against AirCentre Movement Control. They re-authenticate, navigate back through three menus, and either re-enter what they lost or, more often, skip parts they can't remember. In a regulated maintenance environment, that's not just annoying — it's a data integrity risk that someone quietly absorbs rather than escalates.

This gap persists because the MRO vendors are maintaining applications written in architectures from the late 1990s and early 2000s, where session state was never designed to survive interruption. Fixing it properly would mean rewriting session management in the core application — something the vendor won't do mid-product-lifecycle for an issue users have learned to work around. The users adapt; the vendor ships other features; the freezes stay.

The specific failure mode here is that session state — what screen the user was on, what fields they had partially filled — is held entirely inside the client application with no recovery path. A thin intermediary layer running locally can shadow that state continuously: watching what fields are active, serialising partial form data every few seconds, and offering a restore prompt on re-login or application restart. This isn't a VPN or remote desktop workaround — it's purpose-built for the specific workflows (work order entry, task card completion, parts requisition) where mid-session loss is costly.

This is a recurring business because every new technician hired represents a new person learning to re-enter lost data as a normal part of their job, and every contract year the airline runs the legacy system is another year the problem compounds. The cost is in rework time and, more seriously, in the occasional missed entry that only surfaces during an audit.

What to build

Build a Windows tray application that hooks into named MRO application windows, captures active form field values on a configurable interval, persists them locally with a timestamp, and on application relaunch or re-login presents a restore prompt that re-populates the last known field state for the interrupted session.

Where to start

Target AirCentre Movement Control users specifically, since the random logout complaint is documented and specific enough that a demo showing session restore after an unexpected logout would land immediately with any admin who's heard the complaint from their team.

The hard part

Form field capture in legacy thick-client applications often requires accessibility API hooks or UI automation libraries that behave inconsistently across different application versions and Windows configurations — the engineering work to support even two or three target MRO products is substantial before you have a sellable product.

How it makes money

Per-site annual subscription priced against the documented technician rework cost, with a free 30-day trial requiring no IT approval beyond a local install.