MyFlightbook Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, you can

1. Choose "Download" from the Logbook tab.
2. Download the CSV version of your logbook.
3. Open the CSV in Excel or your favorite spreadsheet
   
4. (Optional but encouraged): delete any rows from the CSV file that correspond to flights you are not changing.  This will both improve performance and reduce the possibility of inadvertent edits.
   
5. Make your edits.  Be sure to do this only in columns that are described here; the sheet that you are working from includes some columns that are for information only ("Flight Properties", the hh:mm formatted time fields, and a few other fields) and will be ignored on re-import. 
   
6. IF YOU HAVE any all-numeric tail numbers, double check that the spreadsheet hasn't re-formatted these as dates or to remove leading zeros!
   
7. Save the file as CSV (Excel will go out of your way to try to convince you not to do this, but it has to be CSV)
8. Re-import the file, checking that each flight gets an "update" icon and NOT an "add" icon .  If you see an "add" icon, STOP, or you will get duplicate flights!
   

The critical thing here is that you start from a file that you download (step 2 above), do NOT start with a fresh file. The reason is that when you download the CSV, it will add a column called "FlightID" which is the unique identifier (assigned by MyFlightbook - you can't assign this!) for each flight. When you re-import, the FlightID enables the imported flight to match to an existing flight.  Without the FlightID, import will create new flights, which will lead to duplicates.

If you have a language/country setting that is outside of US-English, There is a bug in Excel where it doesn't send your language/locale information to the site.  When you refresh, therefore, it defaults to US-English conventions (including displaying dates in month/day/year format, instead of whatever date format is appropriate for your locale.) 

There is a workaround, although it's a bit of a hack:

• Open the file in Excel
• Right click in the data area and select "Edit Query"
• At the end of the "Address" line, add &loc=xx-yy where xx-yy is your preferred language and country.  Type it exactly like that - e.g., &loc=en-ca for Canadian English.  (You can generally find the code you need by exploring your browser's "Language" settings, or contact us and we'll be happy to help.)
• Click "Import". You should be prompted for your email and password.

If you are using the Excel download option (which allows you to download a sheet of your logbook once and then refresh your flights from within Excel) and it doesn't work, one thing is to consider whether you have special characters such as "?", "#", or "&" in your password.  This option sends your password (over an encrypted connection!) to the server to authenticate you (keeping your data yours!). 

Unfortunately, Excel doesn't properly encode these characters when requesting data from the server, so it reports an error.

Of course, you could change your password, but that's not an ideal solution. 

A better workaround is to substitute the "percent-encoded" version of the reserved characters when Excel prompts you to type your password.  There are tools on the web (e.g., https://www.urlencoder.org/) that can do this for you.

For example, "&" would be replaced with "%26".

You can tell Excel to remember your password so that you don't have to do this substitution a separate time.

While much can be done in Excel by simply applying a format to a number, hours:minutes is not something that is well supported. As a result, the decimal version of columns must be present and any columns in hh:mm format must duplicate those columns. I have only done a few column in hh:mm just to keep the number of columns from exploding.

However, that said, it is quite easy to create an HH:MM column next to a decimal column. If cell A1 has a decimal number like, say, “6.2”, you can set B1 to =TRUNC(A1) & ":" & TEXT(ROUND((A1-TRUNC(A1)) * 60, 0), "00") and it will display the value in A1 in HH:MM format (6:12, in this case). You can add whatever additional columns you like in HH:MM format using this technique.

Do be careful, though, with trying to do math in Excel using HH:MM. Excel treats HH:MM as a time of day, not hours and minutes. So, for example, if you try to add 14:12 to 10:50, it gives you 1:02 rather than 25:02. You should do all math with the decimal fields, and then use the technique above to format the results.

You can read more detail about how properties work here.  In the interests of keeping the list of properties from exploding (it's already over 600 properties!) we generally try to add properties that meet one of the following criteria:

• It is something that gets totaled. E.g., Number of ILS approaches, carrier landings, or hours spent in a particular role would fall into this category.
• It is something that needs to be identified programmatically for things like currency computation. Examples of this include flight reviews or new ratings or various night-vision properties.
• It is something that someone would typically use on multiple flights and where it thus makes sense to have a standardized way to record it and search for it. Pay rate, soft-field landings, or First Time to an Airport would fall into this category.

Most other things - e.g., introduction to a particular procedure - are best handled as simple comments in the flight. MyFlightbook does not try to cover all elements of a given curriculum/syllabus.

If you believe that you have something that should be included as a flight property, please contact us.

The short answer is that we don't try to make money with MyFlightbook.  It's something we do for fun, and to give back to the pilot community.

We do gratefully accept donations (visit "Donations" under the Profile tab), and thankfully enough of you make donations to cover most of our out-of-pocket expenses.  And we've reserved a few features as "thank-you" gifts for people who donate.  But donating is entirely voluntary; you can use the service for free.

• Getting Started
• Setting Starting Totals
• Importing and Bulk Edit
• Adding Flights
• Simulator Time
  
• Search and Totals
  

• Student/Instructor Relationships
• Signing Flights with a smartphone or tablet

• Using the GPS
• Press-and-Hold Tips

• Images and Videos
• Exporting Data
• Clubs
• Custom Deadlines and Currencies
• Aircraft Maintenance
• Repeating Flights
  

Yes!  There is a tool here that will let you bulk-upload your telemetry and match them to existing flights based on the date and location of the flight.

MyFlightbook supports bulk-import of flights and of aircraft from a "CSV" file format.

Go to the Import Flights page and you can see the details for how to do this. It is basically a three step process:

1. First, make sure your aircraft are in the system. Each flight in MyFlightbook must be associated with an aircraft, which is referenced by tailnumber.
2. Then, put your flights into a CSV spreadsheet.
3. Finally, you can preview the import of the data, and see any potential errors or issues before you upload the data for real.

MyFlightbook doesn't have fixed pre-defined categories of what get totaled; it is all dynamically generated from the type of flights that were flown and the aircraft in which the flights were flown. So what I recommend people do is create one or more "catch-up" flights to capture these totals.

MyFlightbook now has functionality to help you create these flights. Click on the "Logbook Tab" and then "Starting Totals", or click here.  There's a video tutorial on this process here.

When you import flights into MyFlightbook, they are all treated as new flights*. So if you import multiple times, you can get duplicate flights.

If this happens, you can bulk delete your flights from the Account section of your profile.

*If, however, you start from a spreadsheet that you download from MyFlightbook, each flight will include a "FlightID" column. This value is assigned by the MyFlightbook server (do not assign it yourself!) and uniquely identifies each flight. If a flight on a spreadsheet that you import has a FlightID column, and you already have a flight in your logbook with that ID, then that entry in the spreadsheet will update the existing flight in your logbook rather than creating a new flight. You can use this for bulk-edit of your logbook, if necessary.

Usually this is one of three things:

• You are uploading an Excel spreadsheet in its native format (.XLS or .XLSX); verify that you have saved it in CSV format.
• You have one or more rows before the row containing column headers.  The column headers MUST be in the first row.
• Your spreadsheet was saved using an operating system locale that uses a semicolon (";") as a list separator instead of a comma (","), but your browser is using a locale setting that uses a comma (or vice versa).  MyFlightbook keys off of the browser's setting.  If this is the case, see this post for how to set your browser's locale settings to match the one used by the operating system.

If none of these work for you, please contact us and we can usually help get things into shape.

• You will preview your data before anything is imported.  Don't be afraid to upload what you have and see how it looks.
  
  
• The order of the columns does not matter, but every column must have a unique header, and no header can be blank.
  
  
• If a flight does not have data for a given column, that’s fine, just leave it blank; it will be assigned a default value, unless the data is required.
  
  
• Excel will often try to convince you not to use CSV format.  Save it in CSV anyhow, ideally using the file format “CSV UTF-8” (especially if you have non-English text).
  
  
• Flights are matched to aircraft by the full tailnumber, so be sure to include your country-code prefix (e.g., "N" for US-registered aircraft) - on each aircraft and in each flight that references it. You can use "SIM" for a training device (you'll still have to identify the certification level and model to be used) or "#" for an "anonymous" aircraft. (e.g., for a C-172 without specifying a particular registration).  Adding a “Model” column will help MyFlightbook suggest a proper model to use for a sim or an anonymous aircraft.
  
  
• If you need to import a 2nd time, please follow the instructions for bulk-editing in the FAQ or else you will get duplicate flights.  If you do accidentally get duplicates, you can bulk delete your flights from the Account section of your profile.
  
  
• MyFlightbook can now import data that is exported from other logbooks such as ForeFlight or LogTen Pro with minimal manipulation on your part.  These programs both enable custom fields, however.  In the spreadsheet to be imported, the headers for these are in the form "flight_customxxx" for LogTen Pro, or a data type in brackets followed by the name of the field (e.g., "[Hours]Night Vision" or "[Text]My Custom Text Field") for Foreflight.  Since these fields are, by definition, defined by you and thus not standardized, MyFlightbook doesn't know how to interpret them.  If you rename them according to the appropriate matching name, it can be imported properly.
  
  
• Importing from CrewTrac, or other apps that abbreviate tail numbers: MyFlightbook now can read CrewTrac data.  However, CrewTrac often abbreviates aircraft identifiers.  If this is the case, you will want to add "aliases" for each of the aircraft you want to import.  To do this, add a tag to the private notes for the target aircraft in the form "#ALTxxx#", where "xxx" is the alias.  For example, if you fly N123XY and CrewTrac reports that simply as "123", then in the private notes for N123XY, you'll want to add "#ALT123#" to indicate that "123" means "N123XY".
  
  
• If you get an error about no Date column being found, see this FAQ entry.
  
  
• MyFlightbook now supports import of schedules from Leon, Flight Crew View, and RosterBuster.  If your company uses Leon, go to this page to set up access; you can then import flights from the Import page.  Learn more about importing from flight scheduling services.
  
  
• All times MUST be in UTC in order to do any math such as night computation.  However, there is now an option to attempt conversion from local time to UTC on import.  This is most useful for airline schedules that may use airport local time.  MyFlightbook will attempt to use the latitude/longitude of the airports and the date of flight to compute UTC equivalent of local times.  This is, however, a fragile process so use with care.  Please read the blog post about how - and under what circumstances - this is performed and how it can fail.

Well, of course, our question is "why do you want to delete your account?" (and seriously, we'd love any feedback), but if you go to "Accounts" under the "Profile" tab, you'll see a big red button that will delete your account.  Or, contact us and we'd be happy to take care of this for you.

MyFlightbook stores your information in the cloud. If you use a mobile device such as an iPhone, iPad, or Android, your account provides access to your account and limits that access to you. When you save a flight from a phone, it is actually saving it in the cloud using your MyFlightbook account.

Aircraft may have multiple images.  Aircraft are shared amongst users, so PLEASE DO NOT DELETE IMAGES THAT YOU DIDN'T UPLOAD unless they are inappropriate (e.g., copyright violation, pornography, not of an aircraft, etc.)

If you click on the Aircraft tab on the website, you can see a list of the aircraft that you fly. Click on the tailnumber of the aircraft and you can edit the details for the aircraft. You can delete the aircraft if you click on the red "x" on the aircraft's row on the page, but this will only work if you have no flights that use the aircraft.

Perhaps you had a typo in the tail number for an aircraft, or for some other reason wish to change it.  

Please see my blog entry on this topic.

Aircraft on MyFlightbook are shared among pilots. When you enter an aircraft with a tailnumber that is already in the system, the model that you specify for the aircraft is ignored in favor of the one already in use, on the assumption that the other pilots probably have it right. This ensures, among other things, that maintenance updates recorded by one pilot are reflected for another.

But if you go and edit the aircraft, that is treated as an affirmative "Hey, I MEANT for it to be model x." and the aircraft is updated accordingly.  The system looks at the edit you make and determines if it is a major or a minor change.  A major change would be, for example, changing a C-172 to a Boeing 737; a minor change would be editing a C-172P to be a C-172N.  For minor changes, the underlying aircraft is edited.  For major changes, the aircraft is cloned and you are put into the new version. 

When this happens, ALL of the pilots flying that aircraft receive a notification of the change, as do the administrators for the service, so that it can be reviewed.

If you have any questions, by all means please  contact us.

Each aircraft is shared amongst the pilots who have added it to their accounts or recorded flights in it.  (See here for more information about why).  

MyFlightbook is designed to be a logbook, not a flight planner. This has two implications: (a) acronyms are biased towards airports, and (b) obsolete airport codes are kept in the database so that older flights will still (hopefully) display correctly on a map (at least until the airport code is reused for another airport, which does happen on occasion).

So a code like "BRV" will normally resolve to an airport (Bremerhaven, Germany, in this case). But if you want to include the Brooke VOR (BRV) in your route, simply prepend "@" to the code, like this: "@BRV". The "@" tells MyFlightbook to bias towards a navigation aid rather than an airport.

You can also create an arbitrary airspace fix using the "@" prefix followed by a positive latitude, N or S to indicate north or south, then a positive longitude and E or W to indicate east or west.  E.g., @40.69N74.045W is the Statue of Liberty, and @33.857S151.215E is the Sydney Opera House.

The short answer is: any way you like.  MyFlightbook breaks up what you put in the Route field at anything that is not a letter or a number, so you can use spaces or dashes or anything you like to separate airports.

As a logbook rather than a flight planner, MyFlightbook has a strong bias towards airports over navaids.  This means that it has a much more comprehensive set of airports (including many airports that are no longer in existence, or have new codes alongside their old codes) than navaids, but navaids are still in the system.  So, for example, "SFO" means San Francisco International Airport, not the SFO VOR.  You can, however, explicitly direct MyFlightbook to use the navaid by using an "@" prefix.  E.g., "@SFO" means the San Francisco VOR.

• You can do an ad-hoc fix by doing @(Latitude)(N/S)(Longitude)(E/W). E.g., @40.69N74.045W is the Statue of Liberty, and @33.857S151.215E is the Sydney Opera House.  In the mobile apps, you can press and hold the "+" button next to the route field to generate this based on your current position
• "=>" as a path separator has a special meaning: this says to stop connecting the dots.  E.g., A-B-C-D means you departed A, then flew to B, then to C, then to D, and they will all be connected.  But A-B=>C-D means "You departed A and flew to B.  Somehow, you then departed C and flew to D (i.e., there is a gap between B and C)."
• Use "!" as a prefix or suffix when searching for airports.  E.g., "ABC" means "flight had ABC in the route," but  "!ABC" means "Departed from ABC" (i.e., route began with "ABC") and "ABC!" means "Arrived at ABC" (route ended with "ABC").

You can add/edit airports on the site by clicking the Airports tab, then "Add/Edit" airports on the left-hand side.

Do note that you cannot edit an airport that already exists in the database or was created by another user.

Yes.  MyFlightbook uses the oAuth2 protocol, which allows a user to grant permissions for a 3rd party site to perform various actions on MyFlightbook without revealing their username or password to the 3rd party site.  (This is the same way that MyFlightbook can work with Dropbox or Google Drive without getting your passwords to those services).  See the web service wiki for more information, or contact us; we're always happy to help.  When you're ready to get started, visit our developer page to get an oAuth client set up.

Yes.MyFlightbook is now open source.

Check out the playpen; there are a variety of rough-cut tools there (as well as some interesting functionality that never quite "made the cut" for deployment).

MyFlightbook computes all of the currencies that it can based on the flying that it finds in your logbook.  Interestingly, there is not an up-front list, since currency in some cases depends on the model of aircraft being flown, which is a potentially unbounded list).  You can read lots of gory details about the computation here, but here are some useful tips:

Yes.  See the blog for details.

Since CFI time and SIC time are the sorts of things that you either log on lots of flights or on none, these fields are not shown by default (in order to reduce clutter). But they are available!

Simply click on the Profile above, then click "Preferences" and you will see an option to display these fields.

You do not need to explicitly record high-performance/tailwheel/turbine/complex time in MyFlightbook. Since this is an attribute of an airplane (more accurately, of an aircraft make/model) used in a flight, it is implicit in that flight.

So, for example, simply recording time in, say, a Bonanza will add to your high-performance and complex time, and recording time in a Stinson will add to your tailwheel time.

I can add new properties very quickly to MyFlightbook. I tend, however, to strongly resist combination properties because they can lead to inconsistency and weirdness. There are two kinds of combination properties in particular that I resist:

1. Conflating an aircraft property with a flight property (e.g., tailwheel time and solo time)
2. Conflating two flight properties (such as PIC/Cross-Country time)

I.e., I don't like to have a way to explicitly record something that can be computed. The issue is precisely that fact: if it can be computed, then having you enter it is a waste of your time if you do it correctly (e.g., making you enter 2 hours of multi-engine time when you flew 2 hours in a Seneca.), and it's ambiguous if you do it incorrectly.  E.g., what does it mean for purposes of your multi-engine time if you log 1 hour of multi-engine time but 2 hours of PIC time or total time in the Seneca? What does it mean if you forget to log multi-time in the Seneca flight? For things like PIC and Cross-Country (XC), a little more interpretation is required for the computation, but the issues are the same. Fortunately, usually one of the two properties (such as XC in this case) is a "whole flight" property (e.g., a 2 hour flight generally has to have 2 hours of XC) so the formula MIN(PIC, XC) can pretty accurately capture how much PIC-XC time that flight contributed. It's an approximation - and thus imperfect - but in practice I think the error from this approximation is less than the error from forgetting to record all of the possible combinations of attributes for a given flight.

A final reason I don't like combination properties is that the combinatorics can get huge quickly. If I can combine PIC, SIC, CFI, Solo, and Total time, for example, with just 10 other properties (Cross Country, Night, etc.) that would be 50 properties right there.  Bleah.

Checkrides have two dimensions: there's the level/privileges of the rating (recreational/sport/private/commercial/instrument/ATP/CFI/CFII/new type) and there's the category/class/(type) for which the checkride confers the rating.

To be more precise, there really isn't anything called a "multi-engine checkride" (or "helicopter checkride" or "seaplane checkride", etc.). Technically, you have a private pilot, commercial, or similar checkride which was applicable to multi-engine aircraft.

MyFlightbook very deliberately keeps it to just the first dimension, if only because the # of potential ratings if you enumerate them on both dimensions explodes rather quickly (and when you factor in type ratings, it is essentially unbounded).

Besides, it's generally redundant to specify this anyhow: if one performas a private pilot checkride in a multi-engine airplane, it's pretty clear from just that data that it was a "multi-engine checkride."

There are three properties from which you might want to choose to indicate such a flight, though.  You can add these in any combination you like (and, of course, supplement with comments):

1. "Checkride - New Rating" - this indicates that you are getting a new rating.  The fact that it was in a multi-engine aircraft (or helicopter or ...) indicates that the rating applies to that kind of aircraft.
2. "Checkride - Private Pilot" or "Checkride - Commercial" or similar.  This is just a bit more specific than "new rating"
3. "Checkride - New Category/Class/Type" - this makes it clear that the category/class/(type) is also new to you.  Again, the specific category/class/type is implicit in the category/class/type of the checkride aircraft.

The short answer is to simply record these fields discretely; MyFlightbook can compute the combined times.

Look in the 8710 form to see an example of how this is computed.

Since a flight is generally a cross-country flight or not a cross-country flight (indicated by time being recorded in the cross country field), the minimum of the (cross country time, PIC time) is used to determine PIC Cross-country time for that flight (and analogously for solo or dual cross-country time). The PIC (or solo/dual) time for a flight might be less than the whole time for the flight (for example, if flying duties are shared) which is why the minimum of the two values is used.

Every flight on MyFlightbook requires an aircraft.  If you don't fly, though, it's no problem - just pick any aircraft and leave all of the relevant flight times zero.  That way, it won't pollute your totals or currency.  You can log the actual time of ground instruction received using the "Ground Instruction Received" property.

Note that there is a pseudo manufacturer "Generic" in the system; you might try using an anonymous "Generic" aircraft for these flights.  There's a model called "Ground" made by Generic that could be good for exactly this purpose.

MyFlightbook  supports a variety of training devices.  A training device is just another aircraft that you can use for a flight.  You'll log any approaches as normal (and landings, if appropriate), and typically would then log the time in the Ground Sim field (on the main flight form).  You'll often also log some simulated instrument time as well and, for appropriately certified sims (usually full-motion) under appropriate procedures, you can actually even log total time.

So what you'll need to do is add a sim to your account.  You do this as you would any other aircraft, except that when you add it, there is an option to specify that it is training device rather than being a real-aircraft.  

MyFlightbook doesn't care about specific FAA certification levels or full motion; it just needs to know how to treat approaches and landings.  

There are 4 levels of training devices on MyFlightbook from which you can choose:

1. Uncertified (think Microsoft Flight Simulator);
2. ATD;
3. FTD or Sim where you can log approaches but not landings; and
4. Sim where you can  log landings (typically full motion "Full Flight Simulator" or FFS).

You can add the sim using the model of aircraft being simulated (e.g., Boeing 737), or using the sim manufacturers (e.g., Redbird or Frasca); which you choose is entirely up to you.

MyFlightbook will consider the designation of the training device when computing things like currency and progress towards ratings.  See the notes on currency for more information.

The short answer is: "However you like". But there are different kinds of cross country.

For flights that simply leave the pattern, the fact that you left the pattern is implicit in the fact that the "Route of flight" field contains more than one airport. If you want to find totals for these sorts of flights, MyFlightbook lets you search for "non-local" flights, which is really what these are.  These flights count for Part 135 cross-country, so this can be a handy way to find your Part 135 cross-country totals.

For flights that are greater than 50nm from the original point of departure, use the Cross Country field. Note that the mobile apps will fill this in for you automatically if it sees any pair of airports in the route of flight that are more than 50nm apart from each other. There is an interpretation from the FAA here that gives some interesting perspective on this.

More information and more suggestions can be found in the blog.

If you have a paper logbook and your totals do not match what MyFlightbook is reporting, then with one small exception (discussed below), the issue is either an error in the manual addition, a data discrepancy between paper and MyFlightbook, or both; you can trust that the math done by MyFlightbook is correct for the data is in your logbook.

Obviously, since only you have access to the paper, only you can find the math error or data discrepancy, but here are a few techniques that can help.

• First, use the Check Flights tool (under the Logbook menu) and make sure that "Logged Time Issues" is selected.  This can find things like typos, where you had (for example) a 1.4 hour flight but logged 14 hours (missed the decimal point) of PIC time, leading to 12.6 extra hours of PIC time.
• If that doesn't help, then download a spreadsheet copy of your logbook and try to find where the totals diverge as follows:
• Sort the flights by date, ascending.
• Insert a new column and compute a running total for the errant value.  E.g., if you have 1.2 hours in the first flight and 2.3 hours in the next flight, then this column would have 1.2 next to the first flight, 3.5 hours (=1.2 + 2.3) in the next, and so on.
• Now look to see where the running totals in your paper logbook diverge from what is in that running total column.  For example, if the first page of your paper logbook shows 8 flights totaling 11.3 hours, then look to see that the 8th flight row of the spreadsheet says "11.3".  (If you have multiple flights on the same day, then sorting may be slightly different from what's in your paper logbook, so you may need to go an extra line or two in both to get them to sync up)
• When you find the page where these diverge, you've narrowed down the math error or the data discrepancy to that page; at this point, it should be a tractable problem to find the issue.
• An alternative way to do the above procedure is to go to the Print View, select an appropriate number of flights per page (I suggest also using the "Condensed" layout to ensure that you get that number of flights per page), and then follow the procedure above for the spreadsheet to find where MyFlightbook and your paper totals diverge.

MyFlightbook adds to your totals any flight for which you have a non-zero value in the Total Time field.  This is because for some simulators, under some circumstances, you are entitled to do so.

But in general, the rule that MyFlightbook follows is to defer to your judgment; so if you log it, the assumption is that it should count.

Stated another way, if it shouldn't count towards your total time, you should leave the Total Time field for a flight blank (0).  Typically, you would put the time of the simulator training into the "Ground Sim" field instead.

Category/class time (e.g., ASEL, AMEL, etc.) in MyFlightbook is defined as the subset of Total Time flown in that category class.  So there is, by definition, no way to include something in your totals and NOT have it count in the category/class time.  Stated another way, if you're entitled to log the 2.5 hours of full-motion Boeing 777 time as total time, then you are also entitled to log it as AMEL time (and AMEL/Boeing 777 time).

Regardless of the above, you can see your total sim time or your total real-aircraft time, by searching based on aircraft characteristics; there is an option to restrict to just sims or just real aircraft.

Note that many ratings have total time requirements and allow sim time to credit towards those minimums.  In general, MyFlightbook respects this automatically.  But if a rating expresses a requirement like "500 hours total time, of which 40 hours may be in a simulator", this does *not* say that the sim time can be logged towards total time.  Rather, the correct way to read interpret this is that (a) your total time in a real aircraft must be at least 460 hours, and (b) the total time in real aircraft plus total time in (appropriately certified) training devices must exceed 500. 

In Aug of 1997, the FAA's definition of high-performance changed from having more than 200hp to having an engine with more than 200hp.  This meant that some twin-engine aircraft, such as the Piper Seneca, which have two engines that are each 200hp or less (but which have more than 200hp in aggregate) went from being high-performance to no longer being high-performance as of that date. 

AOPA has commentary on this which identifies some of the models which were affected by this change.

To provide consistency with how such time would have been logged prior to the change, MyFlightbook adds time in these aircraft prior to the change to high-performance totals, but not time in the aircraft after this date.

MyFlightbook has a fairly large set of possible takeoffs or landings that you can log, such as carrier landings or non-towered-field takeoffs.  These are all subsets of the total number of landings/takeoffs performed on a given flight, and they can even overlap: e.g., you can record 1 short-field landing 1 soft-field landing on a flight that had just a single landing.

61.57(a)/(b), which govern recent flight experience to carry passengers, simply need to know how many times the aircraft touched earth, and (for the case of tailwheel or night) how many times it came to a full-stop.  As a result, you need to log the total number of takeoffs/landings in addition to any more specific subsets (such as above) so that MyFlightbook can correctly compute your currency.  So if you log one short field and one soft-field landing, you would still need to log 1 (or 2!) total landings.

The math isn't actually off, but the way that it's doing addition may not be obvious.  It's a result of rounding because minutes don't divide into 100 nicely.

MyFlightbook is a cloud based service, which has the benefit of being available anywhere and on a variety of devices, but it also means that access to your logbook and the analysis of it (computing totals or currency, for example) requires a connection to the Internet.  This also enables rapid bug fixes or enhancements without requiring app updates, it increases performance by greatly reducing the amount of data that needs to go back and forth, and it avoids having potentially conflicting changes made in multiple places, or the possibility of viewing out-of-date data.

The key off-line scenario, though, is when airborne, and the MyFlightbook apps are designed to work in this scenario without an Internet connection.  You can build-up a new flight entry (using autodetection to determine takeoffs/landings) and, when a flight entry is complete, if you are still off-line, you can queue it for submission later when an Internet connection is available.

You can update or delete an aircraft on the website. Click the "Aircraft" tab. (You will need to sign in using the same email address and password that you use on your mobile device.)

Click the tailnumber of the aircraft to edit it, or you can delete it from within the list of aircraft.

Note that you cannot delete an aircraft that is in use in any of your flights.

Networks can be flaky things, so the apps will keep trying to submit a flight until they receive a success response from the server. But alas, the success response itself could be lost!  So if the server sees a flight that is a duplicate of an existing flight, it returns success but ignores the newly submitted flight because it's a duplicate.

If you use the MyFlightbook app on a mobile device, it can detect takeoffs and landings for you.

• You must have location services on and enabled, granting permission to the MyFlightbook application to receive location updates. iOS asks for this permission when you first run the app, but if you need to double check, you can go into the Settings app, and then look under Privacy->Location Services to see if MyFlightbook has permission; Android should ask at the point that you turn on auto-detection or recording.
• Make sure that the option to detect takeoffs and landings is turned on. In iOS, this is under "Settings" from the Profile tab, in Android this is directly on the profile page. You should check as well that the takeoff speed is set to something appropriate for your aircraft.
• To conserve battery, MyFlightbook only does detection when a new flight is in progress. A flight is considered "in progress" if it has an engine start time and/or a flight start time, and if it does NOT have an engine end time. You can find these times under "In the cockpit" in the new flight screen.
  

MyFlightbook is available through Apple's App Store and the Google Play store.  If you are having trouble downloading or updating:

The MyFlightbook mobile app can auto-detect take-offs and landings. It does this strictly by speed. When you exceed a particular speed (which you can set), that's a take-off. When you fall below a slightly lower speed (usually 10-15kts less than the take-off speed), that's a landing. When this happens, the nearest airport is appended to your route of flight and the landing count is incremented.

It works pretty well, but not perfectly, as it is possible to see GPS samples that include a bogus speed value. The app does filter samples to try to minimize this, but this is a tricky tuning problem, for three reasons:

• It tries to determine landings in real-time, as GPS samples arrive. It cannot know if the current GPS sample is the last one it will receive. So, for example, if it sees a GPS sample with a 40kt speed after a sequence of 70kt speeds, it cannot know if the next sample will be 70kts (indicating a likely spurious speed), 20kts (indicating a true landing), or if there will be no more samples.
• The app tries to catch both full-stop and touch-and-go landings. Aggressive filtering, which can reduce spurious landings, will also filter out touch-and-go landings.
• The self-reported accuracy of each GPS sample is often better for the position than it is for the speed.

I've found the following affect the accuracy of the landing counts:

• Adjust the takeoff/landing speeds (on iPhone/iPad, this is in the Settings app, under MyFlightbook; on other platforms, it is in-app). Picking a low speed for this will reject more bogus in-flight landings, but at the cost of likely missing touch-and-go landings. Depending on the typical flight you do, this may make sense.
• Give the iPhone/iPad good view of the sky. Sitting on the dash will typically do much better than in your pocket or on your lap, if that is an option
• When you switch apps, the GPS can turn off and on, which can increase the bogus samples. MyFlightbook throws away the first few samples after it wakes up for this reason, but despite this, less app switching gives better sample data.

Use the website (myflightbook.com), and go to "Print View" under the "Logbook" tab. Then print using your browser's Printing command. The printed view will suppress the top form, tabs, etc.  Use your browser's Print Preview command to ensure it looks like you want it to look.

Alternatively, you can download a PDF file (from either the Print View page described above, or the Download page under the Logbook tab) that contains a more traditional-style layout following EASA FCL.050 guidelines.

Go to Logbook->Printing and click the link, select what you want to include, then click on "Open a printer-optimized view of your logbook".  Configure the settings the way that you want them, then click the "link" icon at the top ().  

Please see my blog post on this topic.

This is an approximate number of flights per page because the height of each row cannot be determined with accuracy before rendering of the entire page.

The system does try to adjust the row height based on the data a given flight contains - more data is assumed to require more height, reducing the number of flights on the containing page, but this is just an approximation. Things that contribute to "more height" include: long comments, lots of properties, images (if images are included in the print view) and signatures (if signatures are included)

Please read this blog post for some fascinating insights into why. That said, I encourage the use of "continuous" mode because it avoids all of the approximation issues while sacrificing no functionality that has any actual (vs. perceived) value.

If you want per-page subtotals and a reasonably consistent number of flights per page, there are some things that you can do to ensure that each flight takes a similar height:

• Exclude images from the print view (and signatures too)
• Exclude properties that aren't typically needed in a print layout (such as fuel price, for example)
• In comments, if you use "///", everything after that will be excluded from printing. E.g., "First Solo /// Winds 090@10G15" will print out simply as "First Solo"
• In comments, if you use "///--", it will behave as described above but will force that flight to be the first flight on a new page.

• Engine Start/Block-Out time/Flight Start (if specified)
• Hobbs start, if specified
  
• Flight ID.

If you check the box to allow others to view your flight, you can share a link to that flight.

If you check the box to allow others to view your flight, you can share a link to that flight.

Filling in whole flights:

• The iPhone or Android app can detect takeoffs and landings for you.  You can turn this on in "Settings."  Be sure to tap "Engine Start" when you start your flight and "Engine End" when you end, since the app will only look for takeoffs/landings when it thinks the engine might be running or a flight may be in progress.
• On iOS, if you have a KML or GPX file from another source, you can send it to MyFlightbook, which will try to initialize a flight from it.

Shortcuts:

• Press-and-hold on any quantity-of-time field to cross-fill from the "Total Time" field
• Press-and-hold Total Time to get a calculator
• Press-and-hold the "+" button next to the route field to insert an ad-hoc fix (@lat-lon format, eg., @41.34N108.53W)
• Press-and-hold to make a property stick to the New Flight screen for easy access next time.  Press-and-hold again to un-stick it.
• Press-and-hold on the date-of-flight to reset it to "Today" (local date), or the local date of engine/flight/block start.
  

Yes.  You can turn this option on for new flights.  If you do this, then most subsequent edits made to a given flight will be tracked.

Because you are likely to report your flying based on the results of such searches, queries on MyFlightbook are highly structured in order to avoid false positives or negatives.  This is why searching is not a simple field into which you can simply type search terms like on Google.

Hopefully, the search form - while obviously more complex than a simple search field - is easy to use.  That said, there are a few techniques that can help you refine your search.

• All searching is case insensitive and partial word searches.
• By default, a flight must match ALL of the criteria that you specify in order to be included in the result set.  The more criteria you specify, the fewer flights will match.  But some sections of search criteria (namely flight characteristics and presence of flight properties) allow for you to specify "ANY" or "NONE" criteria.  "ANY" in this case means that any of the criteria will satisfy that section.  (If there are additional criteria specified outside of that section, then that criteria must also be met).  "NONE" works in the same way: if the specified criteria is met with NONE specified, then the flight is rejected.
• If you search for "Local" flights, it will find any flight that has exactly one airport in the route, or that has the same airport twice.  E.g., "KSFO" or "KSFO-KSFO" are both considered local flights.  "Non-local" flights will return anything that leaves the home field.  I.e., this is basic cross-country by the 61.1 definition.
• When searching in the "Flight visited any of these airports" field, you can use "!" as a prefix or suffix. !ABC matches flights that depart from ABC (i.e., ABC is the first airport in the route of flight), and ABC! matches flights that arrive at ABC (i.e., ABC is the last airport in the route of flight).
• Text that you put into the *private* notes for an aircraft are included in search.  (Public notes are shared amongst pilots who fly the aircraft, and these are excluded from search).  So you can make up a tag like "#FIKI#" and put it into the private notes for each appropriate aircraft to indicate that (in this example) it is certified for flight into known icing; you can then search for "#FIKI#" and find all the flights in FIKI-certified aircraft.  Note that there's nothing magical about the hashtag ("#") prefix/suffix, it's just a handy way to avoid false-positive matches.
• In the "Model Contains" field, you can type a partial string to match on the full name of a model (including manufacturer).  For example, if you type "Cessna" then you'll match flights in any Cessna.
• In the "Model Contains" field, if you search for "icao:xxx", then it will only find flights in aircraft that have an exact match to xxx in the ICAO designation for the model.  E.g., "icao:b772" will match flights in a Boeing 777-200, but not in a Boeing 777-300 (which has an ICAO code of B773).
• There is also a field where you can search for any text within the flight (route, comments, properties, etc.). This roughly follows Google conventions:
  • dog cat = must contain "dog" and must contain "cat" (but not necessarily in that order, separated by anything)
  • "dog cat" = must contains "dog cat" (inclusive of spaces)
  • dog OR cat = contains dog OR contains cat
  • -dog = must NOT contain dog
  • -"dog cat" = must NOT contain "dog cat"
  • -"dog -cat" must NOT contain "dog -cat" (i.e., the hyphen inside the quoted text is preserved, not negation)
  • -dog -cat = contains neither dog nor cat ("NOT dog AND NOT cat")
  • -dog OR cat = doesn't contain dog OR does contain cat.
• Specify trailing dates in the free-text field. If you type "Trailing:" followed by a number followed by one of D, W, M, or CM, then this will override any other date setting and set the date to the specified number of Days (D), Weeks (W), Months (M), or Calendar Months (CM) prior to today. For example:
  • "Trailing:90d" - restricts to the 90 days leading up to today
  • "Trailing:36CM" - restricts to the 36 calendar months prior to today.  (E.g., if today is Nov 8 2020, then this will do flights on or after Nov 1 2017)
• In text searches, you can use "?"  and "*" as wildcards to match a single character or any number of characters.  E.g., "C-1?2" will match both C-172 and C-182, and "C*182" will match both "C-182" and "C182".
• Restrict free-text search to the comments field or the route field by using the prefix "CMT=" or "RTE=", respectively.  So, for example
      "CMT=Scrubbed"
  will find all flights where the comment consists of EXACTLY the word scrubbed, while
      "RTE=" (nothing after the "=") will find all of your flights where nothing is present in the route of flight.  Note too that the hyphen prefix described above still works, so
      "-RTE=KSFO*"
  will find flights where the route does NOT start with "KSFO", and
      "-CMT="
  will find flights where the comments are NOT empty.
• As mentioned above, properties are included in the free-form search, along with their labels.  So you can search for flights that have or don't have a particular property using the search form, but you can also search for a particular value for a property by using its label format.  E.g., to find all flights with a student name of John Doe, search for "Student: John Doe" (include the quotes).
• Save a query for later use.  There's a drop-down at the bottom of the search form.  Type a name into the field there, and when you execute the search it will be saved with the name you used.  To use the search next time, just click its name in the drop-down.
  

There are various ways that you can customize MyFlightbook to reduce clutter.  See this blog post.

• Type a date, a year+month, or a year in the paging area of your flights table to quickly jump to the page containing the specified time.
  
• Click a column header to sort your flights by that header.  Click it again to reverse the sort.
  
• Initialize a flight by uploading a GPX or KML file in the "Times and Telemetry" section for new flights.  Press "Autofill" to initialize the flight.  Autofill also works if you provide engine times and airports in the route field.
  
• If you want to embed a public (shared) flight, you can add additional items to the URL for the public page: "show=" followed by the following: map, airports, details, pictures, separated by commas.  E.g., "show=map,pictures" to show only map and pictures but not details.
• If you use the RSS feed, it is Currency by default.  Add "&t=1" to the URL to get totals instead; add "&HTML=1" to get an HTML version (rather than XML)
  
• The page to view public flights uses a static map by default (cheaper to use, and most of the time has all the needed functionality), but if you want a dynamic map (that you can pan/zoom/click) add "dm=1" to the URL.
• Add "night=yes" to force a night mode view to your session; "night=no" turns it off.  I haven't fully tested this; it's primarily for the mobile apps.
• Use "!" as a prefix or suffix when searching for airports.  E.g., "ABC" means "flight had ABC in the route," but  "!ABC" means "Departed from ABC" (i.e., route began with "ABC") and "ABC!" means "Arrived at ABC" (route ended with "ABC").
• Add "path=1" to the url on the Visited Airports page to draw the great-circle paths representing your flights.
• Make up a tag like "#SCENIC" or "#NOTEWORTHY" or "#GREATBURGER" or similar and just put it into the comments for the flight to decorate it with a custom category.  There's  Nothing particularly magical about the hashtag ("#") but it helps to avoid false positives when searching.  So you can find all of your "noteworthy" flights by searching for "#NOTEWORTHY".
• Everything in a comment after "///" will be displayed on screen but will not be printed.  Great to combine with the tag suggestion above.
• When typing in comments, type a "[" followed by a FAR required for a rating or a training maneuver (e.g., "[61.87" or "[slip") to see auto-completions of said required maneuvers.  You can separate multiple words with a hyphen (-).  E.g., "[short-landing" to see completions for short field landings.
  
• You can specify a price-per-hour in the private notes for an aircraft using the notation "#PPH:xxx#", where "xxx" is the price.  E.g., "#PPH:72.50#" means 72.50 an hour.  (Notice that - like all monetary values - this doesn't specify a particular currency; it's assumed to be in your locale's default, so in the US this would be $, in most of Europe it would be €, etc.; just be consistent.)  If you press "Autofill" (website only), for an aircraft that has a price-per-hour then the system will add the Flight Cost property to the flight, using (in priority order based on what's found) elapsed Hobbs time, elapsed tach time, or total flight time.
• If you record the properties "Lesson Start" and "Lesson End", then autofill can fill in an estimate of ground instruction given or ground instruction received.  Specifically, if the duration of the flight is less than the duration of the lesson itself, then the remainder of the lesson time is presumed to be ground instruction, and if you logged Instructor time then it's assumed to be given and if you log Dual Received, it's assumed to have been received.
• If you put "VORCHK" in the comments for a new flight, then a VOR check will be added for the flight's aircraft on the flight's date, and everything after the "K" up to the next whitespace character will be added as a maintenance record note as well.  E.g., if you create a new flight in N12345 on Oct 6 2022 and add "VORCHK-SEA-PAE-4Deg" to the comments, then N12345's last VOR check will be set to Oct 6 2022 (unless it's already set to a later date) and a note "SEA-PAE-4Deg" (indicating two VORs with 4 degree error) will be added in the maintenance notes.  Only works if you provide a note, and only for real, registered aircraft.
• If you use the METAR property on the website, type an ICAO code for an airport and it will show autocompletions from the past several hours for that airport.
• (Lots more to come as I remember all of the numerous tiny features here-and-there)

Yes. You must first designate your instructor as being such in MyFlightbook. Once they have accepted your invitation to be their instructor, they can provide "back of the logbook" endorsements.

There are a wide variety of endorsement templates in the system, including:

• Readiness endorsements (e.g., to take a practical test)
• Competency endorsements such as Tailwheel or High Performance sign-offs
• Periodic training endorsements such as flight review

There is even a free-form template for endorsements that are not built-in.

Yes; there are multiple ways to do so:

• If you have an ongoing relationship with the instructor (e.g., if they are training you for a rating), you should designate them as your instructor in MyFlightbook. They can then sign your flights either in person using the mobile app, or after a flight at your request.
• If you do not have an ongoing relationship with the instructor (e.g., for a one-off checkout) and you are using the mobile app on a smartphone or tablet, the instructor can sign the flight with their fingertip. Save the flight, then view it in your recent flights list and there will be an option to sign it. Hand the phone/tablet to the instructor, and they can scribble their signature.

There are several reasons that MyFlightbook might not match a long cross-country.  The specifics will vary from rating to rating along with the requirements, but here are some things to check:

The FAA does accept digital signatures, and outlines the criteria for doing so in FAA circular AC No: 120-78B. While we believe MyFlightbook is compliant with this AC (and we explain why we believe MyFlightbook is compliant here), the FAA has thus far not indicated willingness to even evaluate, much less certify, online logbook systems for compliance.