Logbook Lore

Ahhhh... Logbook time.

Once again, I've got a guy coming up for a checkride, so it's time to do a logbook audit and total up the hours. Applying for a Private Pilot Certificate is usually your first exposure to the complexities of accounting for your aviation experience.  Right away, it turns out that there's a big difference between how you're supposed to log your hours according to the regulations and they way they want you to report your hours on form 8710-1, the "Application for Airman Certificate or Rating."

They don't match.  At all.  This is a form of hazing.

If you have an old logbook, it won't have enough columns (or the right kind) to account for what you'll eventually have to add up, because the rules (and the application) have changed over time.  And if you're counting time that you flew in another country according to other rules, that time does count towards an FAA certificate, but you need to re-interpret how all those hours are organized.

These things can be dealt with.  It's a hassle, but it's not impossible.  I've gotten into the habit of putting people's time into an excel spreadsheet that counts up hours "8710-style." There's also a great piece of software, Logbook Pro, by nc-software, which totals up your hours six ways 'til sunday, and it's all but required for the professional pilots who wants to keep a resume up to date (in this job market, that pretty much means "everybody").  And Gleim publishes a logbook that keeps running totals of the data that the 8710 wants.  It's the only logbook I've seen that does this.  Go Gleim!

However... I have never seen a logbook (including my own) that didn't have something messed up in it.

• One of my old students had his logbook packed in a suitcase with a bottle of vodka, which broke.  As it turns out, alcohol is a great way to dissolve ink.  Fortunately, the vodka company had an 800 number, and the hotline operator found a procedure involving wax paper, patience, and an oven set at 200 degrees.  The result was a very wrinkly and funny-smelling, but still barely legible mess.
  
• Another student was going through a spiteful divorce, and his estranged wife put his logbook through the shredder.  According to the local FSDO, a signed and notarized affidavit with an honest estimation of his hours up to that point was okay, given the circumstances. Otherwise, he would have had to start over.
• I have a pet parrot.  She likes to chew paper- especially yummy-looking, colorful green paper.  She didn't do much damage to the data, but if I ever want to flip DIRECTLY to November 2009 through April 2010, it'll be easy.

But the very worst damage that pilots do to their logbooks is the stuff they do themselves.  That's mostly because the rules about how to log your flights are passed along by oral history.  The language in the regulations (14CFR 61.51) is very complex. Pilots usually don't ever even try to read it- they prefer to have it explained by someone with experience, and hilarity ensues:

• Every so often, somebody trying to fill space in a magazine will crack the books open and quote from the regs, but will try to wrap it up in a friendly "FAQ" or "Q&A" format.  Novice pilots are supposed to nod and say "ah, sooo" like apprentices to a zen master, despite the fact that these articles are not at all helpful.
• A wiseass who haunts message boards (or writes a blog) will cut-and-paste long passages of the neigh-incomprehensible gobbledeegook from the regs when people express confusion about the magazine articles.
• Your first flight instructor will "show you how to" fill out your logbook, and your second flight instructor will angrily cross out most of what the first guy did, claiming it's wrong.  By the time you're on your fourth instructor, you no longer let your instructors fill out your logbook for you.
• Your buddy swears that you're allowed to fill out something a certain way because he claims "it counts" or "there's a loophole" that lets you do it.  You believe him, and then find out he's wrong 378 flight-hours later, when you try to get a job.
• The ledger-green pages of your logbook are covered with white-out.
• You embark on a long, fruitless quest for "green-out."
• You find yourself in a heated discussion about using the "single line-through" correction method, which someone has found in an old advisory circular on a different topic.

Sometimes, it seems that the logic and lore of logbooks comes from a long game of "Telephone," where someone starts by whispering a phrase ("I like roast beef with mashed potatos") into someone's ear, then they whisper it to the next person, and so on, until by the twentieth person, the phrase has become something else entirely ("Why lick robot feet? Wish for more pot holes"). Here's a little story, and every word is true:

The very worst logbook I ever audited came from a guy who was just really, really, really bad.  He had no clear idea how to fill it out, and he wasn't even consistent about how he got it wrong.  He couldn't even do math.  Every single page was added up wrong, and he didn't carry the totals correctly from one page to the next.  It was soooooo awful, that I prepared myself to tell the poor guy that he needed to get another logbook and copy the entries into it so that it would at least make sense and add up right. He could keep this one so that he'd have his old instructors' signatures in it.

When I saw him again, I was just about to break the news to him, when he pulled out another, older logbook, and asked if I had any questions about his "new copy"- the one that I'd been auditing.

Yeah.  His original logbook was so awful and scrambled up that he'd already done what I was about to suggest, and the "corrected" result was still that bad.  He'd taken it to one of his old instructors and had the guy sign every line... again... and that instructor was no help in putting this new one together, either.  I doubt the guy knew how.  The numbers I finally totaled up were a best-guess, more of a historical reconstruction than an accurate accounting.

But most people don't have it that bad.  There are only a couple of pitfalls that pilots usually fall into, and those aren't explained well in the regs. It's almost always trouble over "Pilot-In-Command" time, and that's something I'll cover in my next post!  Fly safe!