The situation
Ahead of eHandshake's first live customer, Virgin Atlantic, the fuel-uplift proof-of-concept needed to go from an internal experiment to a production-ready product fast. Until this point eHandshake had only existed as an API integration; Virgin Atlantic was the first customer to use it as an actual iPad app in the cockpit, and go-live was already booked with real test flights on the calendar. The existing proof-of-concept was portrait-only, not built to modern iOS practice, and hadn't been designed to handle the range of device sizes and orientations the cockpit setup needed.
What I did
I joined i6 Group as its first dedicated iOS engineer and rewrote the proof-of-concept in around two to three weeks, rebuilding it to modern iOS practice and redesigning it for landscape iPad use across device sizes. eHandshake became the pilot-facing half of the fuel uplift process: fuel uplift was traditionally calculated ahead of time, then adjusted by hand and passed to the refueller on paper. eHandshake connected instead to in2plane, the refuelling app that talked directly to the fuel pumps, giving pilots a live view of uplift progress - flow rate, percentage complete - exactly as the refueller saw it, and letting them request real-time amendments for weather, passenger count or luggage weight, all logged automatically for accurate airline-to-refueller billing reconciliation. I supported the live Virgin Atlantic test flights directly, following along in real time and taking calls from both the i6 and Virgin Atlantic teams to resolve issues as they came up. I later ported in2plane itself from Android to iOS for an additional airline partner, using Kotlin Multiplatform to share the existing fuel SPP protocol code and support 10+ different fuel pump models of varying complexity - communicating over BLE via purpose-built dongles, since iOS can't talk standard Bluetooth SPP to hardware like this without going through Apple's MFi program. Because the platform was mission-critical, I also built in an Ably fallback alongside the primary PubNub real-time layer, so a PubNub outage wouldn't take fuel operations down. eHandshake started as a solo build; the team grew to three once the iOS port entered scope.
The outcome
eHandshake and the in2plane iOS port were deployed across multiple airports internationally. By the time I left i6, every refueller operating at Heathrow ran on the i6 platform - meaning every flight leaving Heathrow was refuelled through software I'd built or led. The dual real-time infrastructure (PubNub with Ably failover) kept the platform available through underlying provider outages, and i6's iOS capability grew from one dedicated engineer to a team of three.