Do I Need to Log My Flights in a Logbook App?

At the moment, the answer is no. A better question would be, should you use a logbook app? There are many valid reasons why you might choose to use one. The main two are to future-proof your pilot logbook and to save time and energy when it comes to reporting your flight hours either to an aviation authority or to an employer.

Who know’s what the future might hold, but the trend with just about everything is becoming more digital and connected. Our belief is the future of applications and licenses will also become digital. The sooner you start digital flight logging, the less effort you will eventually have to make to bring your historical flights and duties in.

Case Studies of Electronic Flight Logging

There’s one particularly interesting case that happened recently. An aviation authority, without warning, insisted that every pilot had to provide their logbook in a specific format. For the pilots who used a paper logbook this meant re-writing thousands of flights into a new logbook format. Users with the right app did this in minutes. Others spent days and sometimes weeks endlessly copying line after line of flights.

Another great example is where a pilot might receive a pay rise after a certain amount of logged hours but must initiate that pay rise themselves. With a good logbook app you can setup a custom report so you can track the exact moment you’d reach a milestone.

A third and interesting case would be to track your flight time limitations, say 100 flight hours in 28 days. It can be hard to track that manually and most aviation authorities put equal responsibility for this on the pilot as well as the aircraft operator. This is pretty tedious to do on paper but is very fast and easy to do with the right app.

The Future of Flight Logging

As the world leans ever closer to becoming more digital it’s highly likely that pilots will drift away from having to prove their flight hours on paper and more likely will have to prove them digitally. That changeover would be a stress if you didn’t already keep your flight hours in a pilot logbook. Of course as a provider of such a service we want people to use it, but we provide this service because we think it’ll be needed much more over the coming years and should be provided at a reasonable cost with excellent customer service.

If you have any questions, comments or want to know if we might be the right logbook for you, please feel free to get in contact with us here at AvionLog.