Made by crew, for crew.

GroundTime is a meetup app for verified airline crew. We're building the layover companion crew have been organizing on their own for years — but verified, safe, and actually useful when you land in a city with a 16-hour layover and nobody to grab dinner with.

The idea: open the app, see meetups happening at your hotel city, organize coffee or drinks or whatever sounds good, the chat closes 3 days after so nothing gets weird. Verified through your airline. No outsiders. No matchmaking. No DMs.

Why verified matters

We verify every user is real airline crew through their airline. Not because crew need a gated club — because crew need to know who they're meeting up with on a layover. The verified-crew-only model is the whole point of the product.

Why we don't do DMs

All communication happens inside meetup groups. No private messaging. No 1-on-1 backchannel chat. If two people want to meet up, they create a meetup — even if it's just two of them. We think this is the only honest way to build a meetup app that respects what crew actually want from each other.

Why meetup chats close

Meetup group chats end three days after the meetup itself. We don't want to be another endless thread where conversations turn into drama. If you had a great time and want to meet up again, create another meetup.

How we think about the crew community

Crew already have an incredible social fabric — the communities, group chats, friendships, mentor relationships, and traditions that hold crew life together. Different airlines, different bases, different crew types have all built their own versions of it.

We respect all of it. We aren't building GroundTime to replace any of it. The connections and communities crew already have will keep doing what they do best — the long stories, the venting, the shared cities, the "anyone got a recommendation for X?" The places where real friendships already start will keep being where they start.

GroundTime is one specific tool for one specific moment: when you're laying over somewhere and you want to find another crew member to grab dinner with, tonight. That's it. Outside of that moment, the rest of crew community is exactly where it should be — wherever you already have it.

If GroundTime ever feels like it's trying to be more than that, tell us. We'll fix it. The whole point is to support what's already working in your crew life, not compete with it.

What we won't do

We've made some hard decisions about what GroundTime is and isn't. Some of these will look like limits. They're actually the whole point.

We won't open the platform to non-crew. Ever. Not for press, not for influencers, not for "VIP" access. If you're not verified crew, you don't get in. The verification is real and manual.

We won't aggregate your location data and sell it. Your layover schedule is yours. Your meetup history is yours. We don't sell it, license it, or hand it to advertisers.

We won't run a public profile feed where anyone can browse crew. Discovery happens through meetups, not through searchable lists.

We won't keep meetup chats forever. They close three days after the meetup ends, on purpose. The connections that matter become real friendships in the world; the ones that don't don't follow anyone forever.

We won't sponsor or promote outside business activities through the platform. No affiliate links, no MLM pitches, no "crew discount" sponsored content that's actually an ad.

How we sustain ourselves

GroundTime will eventually charge for premium features. We won't pretend otherwise. What we will promise is this: what we charge for, and how, has to feel right to crew. If you ever pay for something on GroundTime and feel like you got cheated, we built something wrong.

There's no outside investor pressure pushing us to monetize aggressively or grow at any cost. The pace and the shape of this are up to crew, and to the people building it with crew in mind.

Giving back

The plan isn't just to build an app. It's to build something that gives back to crew.

In-person events. As GroundTime grows, we want to host crew meetups in real life. Sponsored dinners at major layover cities. Reunion nights at industry conferences. Launch parties when GroundTime opens in a new base. Real crew, hanging out, on us.

Honoring crew. The aviation community has its own traditions of remembrance — for crew lost in the line of duty, for the colleagues who came before. We want GroundTime to support those traditions in the way they're meant to be supported. That means partnering with the people already doing this work, and contributing meaningfully.

Giving back through what we earn. A meaningful share of what we earn at GroundTime will go to crew causes. Mental health support for crew in crisis. Memorial funds for families of crew who've passed. Scholarships for crew kids. The specifics will be shaped by crew — and the exact numbers will be worked out openly as we grow.

Hard times. If a crew member is going through something — a furlough, an illness, a family loss — we want premium access to GroundTime to be free for as long as they need it. A quiet way the community looks out for its own.

We don't have all of this figured out yet. We're a small team at the start of something, with a lot of ideas and limited resources. But giving back has always been part of how we think about this, and it'll keep shaping how we grow.

Get in touch

hello@groundtime.com
Instagram: @groundtime.app
Facebook: GroundTime

Threadwell Labs LLC
1111 6th Ave Ste 550 #269241
San Diego, CA 92101