The MyFlightBook thread

I don't think I'm using this thing to it's full potential :)

I've just been manually copying the info from my hardcopy every couple of flights.

You are doing it the hard way. When I use it, put starting Hobbs, tap engine start. Tap engine shut down, ending Hobbs. I have mine set for take off at 55kts which activates flight time. Does your whole route and fills the airports you went to. Even counts your landings.
 
Ah hah! I had forgotten about press and hold. I knew you had coded something to reduce fat fingered typing, but couldn't recall what.
 
I'm doing an update this week to Android, iOS. Apple now has a beta test program, I'd like to beta test the beta test. Give me a buzz (myflightbook@gmail.com) by end of day tomorrow (Oct 18) if you'd like to give it a try.
 
Not sure how you get airport updates but 19A is now KJCA.
 
Not sure how you get airport updates but 19A is now KJCA.
I update periodically from the FAA database, and people can add their own identifiers as well. Both JCA and 19A are in the database (Kxxx works as a synonym for xxx in the system; JCA actually doesn't seem to have an ICAO code "KJCA" but it does have the FAA code "JCA"; since it's so confusing which US airports have K-prefixed ICAO codes and which don't, I just allow the K to be optional).

I deliberately keep old codes (like 19A) around as long as possible because as a logbook (vs a flight planner), your historical record likely includes airports like "19A". Once it gets re-assigned to another airport, though, there's not a lot I can do...
 
Hi, Ghery. There's a property called "Instrument Proficiency Check (IPC) Received" that you can attach to a flight to indicate that you received an IPC. The way I compute currency is that I compute ALL possible currencies based on your flying and then prune the ones for which you've never been current, so at the moment I'm not seeing 6 approaches + hold within a 6 month window (or any of the other combinations that satisfy it); as a result, I'm pruning the instrument currency. If you attach that to a flight, your IFR currency will start to show up. (I just verified this in your account on my development machine. Hey - we're in the same neck of the woods! I fly out of KPAE...)

Found it. Thanks. Now, shouldn't this show up under "Currency"? Or am I doing something wrong still?
 
Found it. Thanks. Now, shouldn't this show up under "Currency"? Or am I doing something wrong still?
It should, but you haven't added the IPC property to a flight yet. If you're using the website, you need to pick the IPC property from the list, then check it, then save (add, or update if you're editing an existing flight) the flight.
 
It should, but you haven't added the IPC property to a flight yet. If you're using the website, you need to pick the IPC property from the list, then check it, then save (add, or update if you're editing an existing flight) the flight.

OK. I updated it on the website. I don't know why it didn't "take" on the app on my phone. Cockpit problem, I would guess.
 
OK. I updated it on the website. I don't know why it didn't "take" on the app on my phone. Cockpit problem, I would guess.
Yep, looks like it took now. On the app, you need to just check the property and then make sure you save the flight; not sure what happened there...
 
Okay I'll toss it out here @EricBe but understand if it's not a high priority...

Ever thought about adding the CFI ratings to the progress check or any of the specific CFI endorsements required (like the spin endorsement)?

Too much of a pain to get all those right for as few people who'd need to track it, perhaps... ?

Just thought about adding the note here since we were doing logbook review yesterday and my CFI realized that all my multitude of logged spins, even with a CFIs signature next to them for different reasons, probably didn't meet the requirement for the "on instructional skills for training stall awareness, spin entry, and spin recovery procedures" of that particular endorsement so to be safe I went up with another CFI today and spun a Citabria and recovered it and talked about it with him. Heh.

His comment was, "Well that's enough of that unless you want to do more, you entered and recovered those fine. Not sure what else to say about it." Hahaha.

Was fun to go goof off in the Citabria though! I'm not complaining! :)
 
Another thought for an improvement down the road if you haven't already thought of it @EricBe ...

In the currency page, it would be kinda nifty if you could tap the specific currency item and have it display a list of flights it decided to use to determine that currency requirement.

It'd be helpful when you know your paper log says you're current and MFB says you're not and you're trying to figure out where the error is. Like doing something dumb like not entering the right number of landings or similar.

Maybe this has been covered before but it also LOOKS to me like, and I could be wrong here... that today's Citabria flight only counted for 1 landing for daytime -- I entered 3, and 3 at a towered airport, and then 2 touch and goes, and there's no particular "full stop" entry that I see...

But I can't quite tell if the currency page counts that as three or one for day currency. It may be correct, it's just kinda "nebulous" without it showing what it used to determine currency.

I know... I could just go play with it and enter something and see the behavior. Ha. I'm just being careful about messing too much with it. I spent hours getting it to match up to 25 years of paper! (And I'm not quite done with that yet, but close! Sooooo close. Haha. Now I'm getting overly protective of the thing. Hahaha.)

Definitely a neat system. I hated the way to add things to flights at first, finding them in the big list and adding them, but it's growing on me.

Which also means that now that I have it really up and working and didn't get totally annoyed by it... LOL... that I need to get a donation off to you!

Seriously I can't complain at all for the "official" price tag! But reality is, you deserve a few bucks for this thing. It really is "good enough" to use as a primary tool.
 
Ever thought about adding the CFI ratings to the progress check or any of the specific CFI endorsements required (like the spin endorsement)?

I confess I haven't, mostly because I don't see a list of required aeronautical experience in 61.187 (other than a 15 hour PIC requirement in 61.187(j)). Most of the items you're referencing, such as spins, are not deterministic "you must have done x of these" sorts of things, but rather areas where you must demonstrate proficiency. All of the ratings progress areas I do today are areas where you can (somewhat) objectively look at the logbook and say "yeah, you met this" or "no, not yet".

The key experience requirement for CFI appears to be that you already have other licenses, and those are in turn pretty deterministic.

Or am I missing the list somewhere? (I'm not a CFI, so entirely possible...)
 
In the currency page, it would be kinda nifty if you could tap the specific currency item and have it display a list of flights it decided to use to determine that currency requirement.

It'd be helpful when you know your paper log says you're current and MFB says you're not and you're trying to figure out where the error is. Like doing something dumb like not entering the right number of landings or similar.

Maybe this has been covered before but it also LOOKS to me like, and I could be wrong here... that today's Citabria flight only counted for 1 landing for daytime -- I entered 3, and 3 at a towered airport, and then 2 touch and goes, and there's no particular "full stop" entry that I see...

But I can't quite tell if the currency page counts that as three or one for day currency. It may be correct, it's just kinda "nebulous" without it showing what it used to determine currency.

Yeah, I've had this request a bunch, but it's actually really hard to do. For things like passenger currency (3 takeoffs/landings, and I only look at landings in this case because, well, most people just log landings), it's generally pretty easy to point to the specific flights controlling the currency. But other currencies are considerably more complicated or inherently ambiguous.

Consider, for example, instrument currency: suppose on Jan 1 you do 6 approaches and a hold in a real aircraft. You're now current per 61.57(c)(1) until July 31. Now suppose that on May 15, you do 6 approaches, holding, and the other maneuvers specified by 61.57(c)(3) in an ATD. That also makes you current until...July 31. So now you ask "My Instrument currency is good until July 31 - which flights contributed to that?" You can choose. It was either your Jan 1 flight or your May 15 flight, or both. And further, the ATD rule says you need 3 hours of instrument experience in an ATD; suppose you've got 10 hours of that spread throughout a bunch of flights in May. Which flights counted towards the 3 hours? Answer: any subset you like that adds up to 3 hours.

So "which flights did it for me?" is, unfortunately, an impossible question to answer in a deterministic way; I can only answer whether or not you meet the requirements.

Maybe this has been covered before but it also LOOKS to me like, and I could be wrong here... that today's Citabria flight only counted for 1 landing for daytime -- I entered 3, and 3 at a towered airport, and then 2 touch and goes, and there's no particular "full stop" entry that I see...

But I can't quite tell if the currency page counts that as three or one for day currency. It may be correct, it's just kinda "nebulous" without it showing what it used to determine currency.

This gets a little confusing, but the 3 fields on the main form are the key ones here. The "Landings" field is the total number of times that wheels touch ground (or, I suppose, water/snow, if you're appropriately equipped). This field - and only this field - counts towards 61.57(a) for other than a tailwheel airplane, since 61.57(a) does not distinguish touch-and-go from full-stop, day from night. ALL OTHER landing fields, both on the main form but also in the list of properties that you can attach to a flight, are descriptive - and potentially overlapping - subsets of this field. 61.57(a).

For tailwheel currency, full-stop is required, so I look at Full Stop Day and Full-Stop Night landings (which is why these are on the main form). These are also subsets of the total landings count. And for night currency (61.57(b)), I look at the Full-Stop Night landings.

All of the other types of landing counts that you might specify (touch-and-go, towered, no-flap, short-field, soft-field, etc.) are really for your own information; they do not contribute towards currency. Mostly again this is because they can be overlapping. E.g., you could have a flight with 3 total landings, but two of them were short field, two were soft field, two were at a towered airport, and two were touch and go; obviously some landings checked multiple boxes, but if I looked at each of these landing types I'd (erroneously) determine that you had done eight (or perhaps eleven?) landings.

At one point I had considered removing this ambiguity by having you add a landing record for each landing, and then adding attributes to each record ("this landing was a touch-and-go on a soft-field with a tower"). While that would certainly be unambiguous, data entry would be a pain in the neck.

For your flight today, I see that you did in fact enter 1 full-stop landing. (It says "3 (1D)" in the landings column, which means "3 total landings, 1 full-stop-day") Since the Citabria is a tailwheel, that's why it only counted one landing towards your currency.
 
Yeah, I've had this request a bunch, but it's actually really hard to do. For things like passenger currency (3 takeoffs/landings, and I only look at landings in this case because, well, most people just log landings), it's generally pretty easy to point to the specific flights controlling the currency. But other currencies are considerably more complicated or inherently ambiguous.

Consider, for example, instrument currency: suppose on Jan 1 you do 6 approaches and a hold in a real aircraft. You're now current per 61.57(c)(1) until July 31. Now suppose that on May 15, you do 6 approaches, holding, and the other maneuvers specified by 61.57(c)(3) in an ATD. That also makes you current until...July 31. So now you ask "My Instrument currency is good until July 31 - which flights contributed to that?" You can choose. It was either your Jan 1 flight or your May 15 flight, or both. And further, the ATD rule says you need 3 hours of instrument experience in an ATD; suppose you've got 10 hours of that spread throughout a bunch of flights in May. Which flights counted towards the 3 hours? Answer: any subset you like that adds up to 3 hours.

So "which flights did it for me?" is, unfortunately, an impossible question to answer in a deterministic way; I can only answer whether or not you meet the requirements.



This gets a little confusing, but the 3 fields on the main form are the key ones here. The "Landings" field is the total number of times that wheels touch ground (or, I suppose, water/snow, if you're appropriately equipped). This field - and only this field - counts towards 61.57(a) for other than a tailwheel airplane, since 61.57(a) does not distinguish touch-and-go from full-stop, day from night. ALL OTHER landing fields, both on the main form but also in the list of properties that you can attach to a flight, are descriptive - and potentially overlapping - subsets of this field. 61.57(a).

For tailwheel currency, full-stop is required, so I look at Full Stop Day and Full-Stop Night landings (which is why these are on the main form). These are also subsets of the total landings count. And for night currency (61.57(b)), I look at the Full-Stop Night landings.

All of the other types of landing counts that you might specify (touch-and-go, towered, no-flap, short-field, soft-field, etc.) are really for your own information; they do not contribute towards currency. Mostly again this is because they can be overlapping. E.g., you could have a flight with 3 total landings, but two of them were short field, two were soft field, two were at a towered airport, and two were touch and go; obviously some landings checked multiple boxes, but if I looked at each of these landing types I'd (erroneously) determine that you had done eight (or perhaps eleven?) landings.

At one point I had considered removing this ambiguity by having you add a landing record for each landing, and then adding attributes to each record ("this landing was a touch-and-go on a soft-field with a tower"). While that would certainly be unambiguous, data entry would be a pain in the neck.

For your flight today, I see that you did in fact enter 1 full-stop landing. (It says "3 (1D)" in the landings column, which means "3 total landings, 1 full-stop-day") Since the Citabria is a tailwheel, that's why it only counted one landing towards your currency.

Argh. No wonder this stuff is so hard to code. LOL!

Does the currency stuff deal properly with a day takeoff and a night landing? I've never messed with it.

Since today was my first flight in a tailwheel since the 90s (haha) I'd forgotten about the full stop part. I'll have to go review that. :) (Yay yet another "gotcha" for this idiot who has a CFI ride on Monday! Realizing I missed something -- again -- just makes me want to make dang good and sure I don't get tripped up by this stuff! Dang it!)

For the CFI stuff, yeah... most of it doesn't fit the data model. There's oddball stuff for all the different categories and what not. The initial spin endorsement, the different stuff for multi and singles, and the glider and other types weirdnesses.

No big deal on the CFI stuff. It's a lot of work for tracking something not a huge amount of people do, and the candidates need the practice figuring out logbooks and endorsements and all that jazz anyway! Ha. (It's incredibly not fun trying to read 25 year old chicken scratches in my old book anyway, let me tell ya! Hahaha! Not looking forward to reading someone else's chicken scratches!)

I even "caught" something today's CFI goofed on today's log entry that I actually texted him and we met up later and fixed. Haha. Wasn't a big deal, but we both got to talking and forgot to write something in there. So we talked and watched airplanes landing overhead in a parking lot after we fixed it. I mean, that didn't suck... haha. We both agreed the DPE probably wouldn't have cared (location of a required item, undefined but traditionally placed in a particular spot), but it wasn't worth finding out that it was a problem on checkride day.

Thanks. More folks should really try this system. It seems a bit daunting at first but it ends up making sense after you do some entries and figure it out.

Personally I like the iOS interface better than the web, but when I was slogging through logbooks the big screen and a desk with the books open is just better.

I had a few lines back in the data import back into 2012 that for some reason ended up not having any time logged on them at all, which looked to me like a goofed import on those lines quite a while back that was throwing my totals all off, so a bunch of hours of searching by dates that matched a page at a time of the second logbook and auditing each page finally found those and once they were corrected the totals started falling into place.

I also had a couple of duped lines that were identical and I'm sure that was me messing up one of the spreadsheet download/edit/import sessions long ago, but those were easily found by date search. The only time that got painful was when a day has logs on one page and the next!

It's sooooo close now. And my CFI jokes, "The longer you do this stuff the less sense your logbook will make, but by then it doesn't matter anymore." Haha so true.

I have no plans to get it but I don't even want to think of the slog of auditing that would be needed if someone doesn't keep up on entries and decided to do the paper to electronic synch up somewhere up around an ATP ride. Uggggghh! :)
 
Myflightbook is amazing. I love the visited airports feature with the map and the rating progress feature.

There is one issue I noticed. The rating progress for commercial "10 solo landings at night in a single engine airplane (flight in the traffic pattern and a control tower are assumed)" should check if you said how many landings were done at a controlled tower and if you had solo time in the additional properties section of the log book entry. Also saying it was landings at an uncontrolled airport should cancel this out. For some reason when I logged solo time, it counted the landings I made even though it was not at a controlled airport.
 
Does the currency stuff deal properly with a day takeoff and a night landing? I've never messed with it.

Yes, but I've always been loose with this, since traditional paper logbooks often don't have a spot to record takeoffs (and since takeoffs typically match landings anyhow). So for regular passenger currency (61.57(a)), I don't even look for takeoffs. For 61.57(b) (Night currency), I look for night-takeoffs them but don't require them - if you have 3 full-stop-night landings within 90 days but don't have 3 night takeoffs, I tell you that you're current but give a warning to ensure that the takeoffs weren't found and to make sure that you actually did them.
 
Myflightbook is amazing. I love the visited airports feature with the map and the rating progress feature.

There is one issue I noticed. The rating progress for commercial "10 solo landings at night in a single engine airplane (flight in the traffic pattern and a control tower are assumed)" should check if you said how many landings were done at a controlled tower and if you had solo time in the additional properties section of the log book entry. Also saying it was landings at an uncontrolled airport should cancel this out. For some reason when I logged solo time, it counted the landings I made even though it was not at a controlled airport.

Yeah, this gets to the whole issue I described above about how to record landings. If I had you record each landing individually and then decorate it with it's appropriate descriptors (was it night? was it full-stop? was it at an airport with a control tower? etc.), then I could answer this unambiguously (or at least with less ambiguity), but the data-entry hassle would go up dramatically; I decided to optimize for more straightforward data entry at the expense of some ambiguity about which criteria applied to which landings. So in this case, I decided that if I saw solo full-stop night landings, I would count them and just assume that a control tower was present (hence the disclaimer to that effect).

I suppose I could subtract any landings that for which you explicitly said no control tower, but that just shifts the ambiguity the other way. E.g., suppose you had a solo flight that started in day and ended at night, and you did 3 day landings at your local uncontrolled field before flying over to a controlled field for 3 full-stop night landings. You'd record 6 total landings, 3 full-stop night landings, 3 landings at a controlled airport, and 3 landings at an uncontrolled airport. I'd see the solo, see the 3 night landings, and then subtract off the 3 uncontrolled airport landings, leaving you with 0. The data is inherently ambiguous here - there's no way to know for sure what to do. (The same record could just as easily be describing 3 day landings at the towered airport, followed by 3 night landings at the uncontrolled airport; you just can't tell from the data).

There are lots of other similar ambiguities. E.g., the whole solo time thing: you could have been with an instructor on that flight, who got out and let you do some solo landings, but then was with you for the rest of the landings. In that case,t he landings were not solo and shouldn't count. I just look for solo time on the flight and count landings as solo landings if I find that time.

Making these sorts of tradeoffs is, I think, the right call for two reasons:
  • Doing this data entry in an unambiguous way is incredibly cumbersome, and largely unnecessary except for high precision in ratings progress. (After all, what matters is that you can demonstrate to the examiner that you did the landings, and you can look at the logbook and say "Yeah, KSFO has a 24x7 operating tower, so these count", even if MyFlightbook doesn't know that)
  • Overall, these assumptions and approximations tend to be MORE accurate than explicitly entering this. How is that possible? Consider combination properties, such as "Night solo cross-country time" (i.e., the amount of time on a flight that is night, solo, and cross-country). I very much try to avoid combination properties in MyFlightbook because they actually just muddy everything up. So suppose you log a 2 hour night solo cross-country flight. You'd log 2 hours of total time, 2 hours of cross-country time, 2 hours (presumably) of solo time, and 0-2 hours of night time (depending on when the sun set). Now - do you also have to explicitly enter night-solo time and night-cross-country time and solo-cross-country time and night-solo-cross-country time? Whew, that's exhausting. And what happens if you don't enter, say, the solo-night combination - does the flight still credit towards an 8710 or ratings progress that requires solo-night? If the answer is "yes", then why bother entering it? And if the answer is "no", then it clearly doesn't make sense based on the data of the flight. And what happens if you said for this flight 1.5 hours of night, but logged 2 hours of night cross-country and night-solo? Clearly that doesn't work. So for these sorts of scenarios I do an approximation - computing things like "solo night" as MIN(solo, night). It's an imperfect approximation to be sure (your solo time might have been during the day portion of the flight with your instructor back on board during the night portion, for example), but these tend to be corner cases whereas the data entry issues I describe are vastly more common, so it is generally more accurate overall than relying on explicit data entry.
 
@EricBe is the visited airports query capable of filtering on the state the airport is in? If so, I can't figure out which field to handle it. If not, I'll add my request as a feature to add. Would love to be able to query my visited airports by state.
 
@EricBe is the visited airports query capable of filtering on the state the airport is in? If so, I can't figure out which field to handle it. If not, I'll add my request as a feature to add. Would love to be able to query my visited airports by state.

I'm afraid not. There are about 14,308 distinct attributes that various data sources* for airports offer, and given that I try for good international coverage as well, I kept things at a common set of attributes that everybody offers**. Sadly, State is not one of them. (Though I suppose I could add that column to the database and just leave it blank where it doesn't make sense...)

--Eric

*Free being the most important attribute of the data source, independent of what *data* attributes they provide.
**The common set:
  • Code (can be FAA, ICAO, or IATA),
  • Name (e.g., "La Guardia")
  • Type (Airport? Seaport? Heliport? VOR? NDB?)
  • Latitude/Longitude
 
@EricBe: I noticed that the VOR check on the currency page is not negating the number of days overdue. (I assume you subtract today and due date and report overdue for negative results.) For instance, today it says "-26 day(s) overdue". This is purely cosmetic but it's there.
 
@EricBe: I noticed that the VOR check on the currency page is not negating the number of days overdue. (I assume you subtract today and due date and report overdue for negative results.) For instance, today it says "-26 day(s) overdue". This is purely cosmetic but it's there.

Huh. And I just learned there's a VOR check! Hahahaha. :)
 
@EricBe: I noticed that the VOR check on the currency page is not negating the number of days overdue. (I assume you subtract today and due date and report overdue for negative results.) For instance, today it says "-26 day(s) overdue". This is purely cosmetic but it's there.

LOL, I don't know how long that code's been in there. Fixed. Thanks for letting me know!
 
LOL, I don't know how long that code's been in there. Fixed. Thanks for letting me know!
And as a bonus, now you know that the VOR check currency feature has a user! Happy Easter and keep up the good work.
 
I didn't see @EricBe announcing it here... so I'll sneak in with the info...

Eric has added to MFB the ability to save your Basic Med completion info (as PDF's or JPG's) within the Pilot Profile pages.

Once logged in to www.myflightbook.com, go to the Profile Tab across the top, then Pilot Info on the left, and click on words "FAA BasicMed" (Not to @EricBe: The link isn't that obvious. You might want to update the code to have it show as a hyperlink or provide a button). Then you can update the dates you took the online course and upload the documents and/or photos.
 
What @AggieMike88 said. :) Let me have a look to see if I can make the link to add a new event a bit more obvious...
 
OK, try it now.
 
BTW, if you want to follow MyFlightbook on Facebook or Twitter, that tends to be where I announce new features (though I do check in here periodically as well).
 
Yep, always seems to be something that hits in the middle of the night. Server is back up, not sure what hit it. But reboot first, diagnose second. :)
 
Yep, always seems to be something that hits in the middle of the night. Server is back up, not sure what hit it. But reboot first, diagnose second. :)
Just got to remember to wind the rubber bands before going to bed.
 
Well, I obviously won't complain if you do donate, but after the site being down ~8 hours last night (longest down time in its history--it went down just as I went to bed, didn't notice until morning), I hardly deserve it right now.
 
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