Paper logbook and excel+dropbox here too.
I bought LogTen Pro some years ago, but didn’t like it. Excel offers more flexibility in arranging and analysing your data.
Peter wrote:
How do you get instructor signoffs?
Actually, just going back into the documentation, you can get digital sign-offs on your tablet / smartphone with Safelog…. But, I like paper as primary and electronic as a backup and for currency calculations etc. I know I could do all that on a spreadsheet…
dublinpilot wrote:
simply as a backup to my paper logbook.
That’s not really a backup. A backup (IMO) would be scanned copies stored somewhere safe.
The U.K. CAA for one won’t accept your excel as replacement. You’ll have to go back to whatever you had the last time they saw your logbook.
The U.K. CAA for one won’t accept your excel as replacement. You’ll have to go back to whatever you had the last time they saw your logbook.
Do you have a reference / backup information for that, @Denopa?
I am not at all surprised (especially if the “logbook” is full of flights between farm strips and other places where no movement logs are generated which could confirm at least some of the movements) but it will shock many people.
Fundamentally there is no difference between one electronic logbook and any other. All are trivial to forge.
I’m afraid I have nothing but anecdotal evidence.
denopa wrote:
The U.K. CAA for one won’t accept your excel as replacement. You’ll have to go back to whatever you had the last time they saw your logbook.
Denopa,
I’ve read on various forums over the year, where people lost their log books, and they had to swear an affidavit giving their best estimate at the number of hours that they had and the CAA accepted that.
For me, I’ve no real need for hours anymore. But being able to swear an affidavit with 100% confidence in the number, and having a true record of what I’ve flown, would be enough for me. At this stage, my log book is more a reminder of what I’ve done, than a legal document.
But just following the logic of your quote, then that means if you have a paper logbook, that you could never swap to an electronic one? That doesn’t make sense.
Balliol wrote:
I use logbook.aero now and it has been great, but through the app seems to have been very erratic of late and I’m not sure the company are still really maintaining it?
Do you need the app? Just open logbook.aero directly in your browser.
The fact that it makes no sense does not mean the CAA doesn’t do it.
This was on an excel spreadsheet so no idea what they would have said for another system. No option for an affidavit was mentioned.
I have more than anecdotal evidence. I got a CPL, an ME rating, an FI rating, the removal of the supervisory restriction, and an ME-IR upgrade added to my licence with an Excel logbook only. All they requested was that I to sign every printed page as true and correct. So that’s five CAA visits in total.
Before that it was a standard handwritten one (for PPL, IMC rating, and SE-IR).
The “swearing an affidavit” is only required if you have NO records, and have to swear something along the lines of “I have flown 35,000 hours, honest, guv!”.
