Private pilot Chris Smith was sure he had grounds for complaint.

After all, he’d come very close to dying.

The checklist program on his Palm Pilot that was supposed to make flying an unfamiliar single-engine plane straightforward had made it a nightmare instead.

“The human interface was terrible,” Smith recalls. “For a while I was afraid I was going to be the lead story on the nightly news.”

He wasn’t – but once he got the plane safely on the ground, he called the software company, which he says was not

terribly sympathetic.

“They suggested that if I didn’t like their checklist program, I should write my own,” he said.

That’s exactly what he and his wife Kerry, Bainbridge residents and owners of AirSmith, LLC, have done.

Their new flight management software, called FlightPrompt, is one of the latest entrants into the growing field of hand-held aviation technology – pre-flight and in-flight aids for pilots, designed to run on personal digital assistants like the Palm Pilot.

Pilots, who Smith says tend to be “gadget freaks” anyway, are attracted to the compact devices, whose interactive, paper-free format and backlit screens are suited to the cramped and often dark cockpit.

PDAs, Smith said, are especially helpful in coping with the challenges facing the country’s 150,000 or so “renter pilots” – private pilots who are licensed to fly smaller, “general aviation” craft but who don’t own their own airplanes.

Unlike commercial and military aviators, who are certified to fly specific planes, renter pilots receive general instruction in a class of planes – the single-engine, land-based craft that are the staple of flying clubs.

Because the pilots have to rent plane time from someone else, usually their local airfield, renters can end up piloting planes in which they’ve had little or no flight time.

Numerous craft-specific checklists and other commercial aids existed to help pilots manage the task of switching planes, but they were all missing a crucial element – a set of standards that could be applied to every aircraft.

“Eighty percent of the routine is the same for every plane,” says Smith. “That 20 percent – sort of like where the windshield wipers are in a rental car – is what makes renter pilots work so hard.”

The Smiths, who are both avid pilots, began tackling this problem a few years ago, developing a set of “cue cards” that organized the basic flight functions common to all craft.

A few calculations specific to the aircraft were all that was necessary to adapt the Flight Prompt system to most general aviation planes.

“I was surprised that no one had really developed these standards,” says Smith. “It’s really a different way to fly – using a single routine in place of multiple ones.”

Flying on cue

The Smiths originally developed the cue card system as a paper-based product, but after Chris got his first Palm Pilot, he realized the system was a natural candidate for a PDA – especially given the shortcomings of other software on the market.

Smith, who works in technical sales for IBM, did the initial programming himself, using design software – a so-called “development environment” – for Palm applications that he found on the web, then hired a Palm programmer to “pretty it up.”

The Smiths recruited members of the Wings Aloft flying club out of Boeing Field to flight-test the system.

Once the product was in the programming stage, Kerry Smith brought to bear her experience in publishing – and her appreciation of the vagaries of e-based companies from her days at a Seattle “dot.gone” – to market FlightPrompt and run the company.

The efforts seem to be paying off. Since its debut in November of last year, 200 trial versions of the web-based product have been downloaded, and the product received a favorable review in “PalmFlying” magazine.

The couple believes interest will increase once the weather improves and private pilots across the country take to the skies again.

Smith has also written a companion book on general aviation, “Practical Flying,” which will be out later this year.

FlightPrompt isn’t the first aviation product the couple has developed together. Early in their courtship (the two were married in 1996), while on a flight, they discussed the shortcomings of another staple of private piloting: the knee board that holds flight maps, checklists and the like – and then took their new design to a local leather store to mock up.

This latest endeavor, the Smiths say, has combined their passion for flying and a long-term desire to run their own business.

“We’ve always had the desire to do something for ourselves,” Kerry Smith says.

Chris Smith hopes the new undertaking will keep him in the pilot’s seat.

“Flying is my passion,” he said, “and I’ve used my other work as a way to be able to do it.”