The MyFlightBook thread

Hey, Eric. I hope that all is well! I am having a problem that seems to crop up every once in a while on the desktop. Every time I open the app on my computer, it shows the results from a search I did a long time ago. I clear the search and reset, but every time I save a new flight, the search result comes up again. Any idea what I am doing wrong? Thanks!

Abram Finkelstein
N685AS
 
You're not doing anything wrong. I'd bet that if you look in the url you'll see fq=... as one of the parameters. "fq" is "flightquery", and the gibberish that follows it is a compressed/encrypted specification for the query. This allows you to return to whatever context you came from.

So, for example, if you have your logbook open with no query, hover over the context menu (the drop-arrow thing) on the right of the flight and then hover over the "Edit this flight" option. Look in the browser's status bar (or click it, if necessary); you'll see that the URL is https://myflightbook.com/logbook/Member/LogbookNew.aspx/#### (where "####" is the numerical ID of the flight).

Now, do a search (any search) and do the same experiment. The URL will show as https://myflightbook.com/logbook/Member/LogbookNew.aspx/####?fq=... That way, when you edit the flight, it will return you to your logbook with the same query applied. If you need to edit, say, all of your flights from a given month, this is a very useful way to do that.

Probably easiest thing to do is just click on the "Logbook" tab.
 
Normally I wouldn't cross-post something personal here, but I think you'll see why. One of my hobbies is that I like to play music, and I've written a new album and hired professional musicians (well, and then me on guitar) to play/record it. Why is this relevant here? The album is titled "Up in the Air", and it has songs like "Tailwinds", "1200", and "Turbulence". Each song should be accessible to non-pilots, but pilots should register all of the metaphors and references that might...umm, "fly" over the heads of non-pilots.

The genre is my demographic: middle-aged-gen-x-suburban-dad. I'd love to know what you think!
You can listen at https://hothparkhouseband.com/page/upintheair/ or on the streaming service of your choice.
 
@EricBe , I've started using my Android phone more often for entering flights, and due to various reasons I am not using the auto-logging feature.

When I go to enter a new flight manually, the "date" does not default to the current date. Rather, it seems to stay at whatever the last day used was, on the previous entry. Was this intentional?
 
I've noticed that too and had to edit a few entries when I forgot to change it. I think there's an option in the preferences to have it stay on the last date or go to the current one.
 
RussR said:
@EricBe , I've started using my Android phone more often for entering flights, and due to various reasons I am not using the auto-logging feature.

When I go to enter a new flight manually, the "date" does not default to the current date. Rather, it seems to stay at whatever the last day used was, on the previous entry. Was this intentional?
Click to expand...
Yes. See https://myflightbookblog.blogspot.com/2022/04/default-date-of-flight-on-ios-or-android.html for the explanation why.
 
I just wanted to thank @EricBe for the MFB game "Airport Quiz", where it shows you a Google Maps aerial image of an airport you've landed at, and gives you 5 choices of what airport it is. It's a fun diversion, and really hard! I mean, it will dredge up that grass runway that you landed at once 20 years ago.

Sometimes I have no idea what airport it is, but can still get it by eliminating others. "Okay, I know it's not DFW, and there are way too many trees for it to be the choice in Utah, it looks like it might be big enough to have a three-letter ID instead of one with numbers..." that kind of thing.

It's fun, and I have yet to get 100% as far as I can remember.
 
EricBe said:
Yes. See https://myflightbookblog.blogspot.com/2022/04/default-date-of-flight-on-ios-or-android.html for the explanation why.
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This does not seem to completely describe the behavior on Android. I had two flights yesterday, which I entered today. When I went into the "New" tab in the app, the date defaulted to the last date I flew. That was a few weeks ago, so instead of scrolling a bunch, I tapped "Now" to take the date to today and then scrolled back one day. But after I entered the first flight and went to enter the second flight, the date went back to today....
 
Lindberg said:
This does not seem to completely describe the behavior on Android. I had two flights yesterday, which I entered today. When I went into the "New" tab in the app, the date defaulted to the last date I flew. That was a few weeks ago, so instead of scrolling a bunch, I tapped "Now" to take the date to today and then scrolled back one day. But after I entered the first flight and went to enter the second flight, the date went back to today....
Click to expand...
Correct. As described in the link above, when you save a flight, I reset the "New Flight" form and default it to whatever "today" is where you are. It *doesn't* stay with the date of the last flight you entered.
 
EricBe said:
Correct. As described in the link above, when you save a flight, I reset the "New Flight" form and default it to whatever "today" is where you are. It *doesn't* stay with the date of the last flight you entered.
Click to expand...
Ah, it does say that, but I was confused by it because in the example you gave, "today" was the date of the last flight entered. So it wasn't clear to me that it would always revert to "today," regardless of the date of the last flight. If it says that somewhere, I missed it.
 
I’m inputting a flight and found a crash bug in the iPad version of MFB. I have the Magic Keyboard attached to the iPad and I am typing in the flight information. When I hit the Tab key from the total time field, presumably to jump to the first of my frequently used properties, it crashes the app. It happened twice in a row. I tested this on iPadOS 15.5, then updated to 15.7 and confirmed it. I think I have MFB 2022.08.01.
 
iamtheari said:
I’m inputting a flight and found a crash bug in the iPad version of MFB. I have the Magic Keyboard attached to the iPad and I am typing in the flight information. When I hit the Tab key from the total time field, presumably to jump to the first of my frequently used properties, it crashes the app. It happened twice in a row. I tested this on iPadOS 15.5, then updated to 15.7 and confirmed it. I think I have MFB 2022.08.01.
Click to expand...
Back home now. Can't find my physical keyboard for the iPad (huh, I could swear I had one), but in the debugger this all works fine; I can't seem to reproduce it. can you email me (myflightbook@gmail.com) a crash report and I can try to figure out what the crash is? https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/acquiring-crash-reports-and-diagnostic-logs tells you how to do this.
 
Here’s an arbitrary statistic that I’m curious about: What airports have I visited with the most distinct aircraft? Is there an existing way to check that?
 
Hmmm...at the moment, probably the easiest way to do that would be in Excel. You'd want to download the visited airports table and the CSV of your flights and I bet you could build a pivottable or use a sumif based on distinct tails. But even then it would be approximate because a simple "route contains" can have some false matches due to airport name coalescing (e.g., Maui is PHOG and OGG; I merge these for purposes of visited airports) and because my visited airport rules have a few quirks (see https://myflightbookblog.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-are-visited-airports-computed.html).
 
EricBe said:
Hmmm...at the moment, probably the easiest way to do that would be in Excel. You'd want to download the visited airports table and the CSV of your flights and I bet you could build a pivottable or use a sumif based on distinct tails. But even then it would be approximate because a simple "route contains" can have some false matches due to airport name coalescing (e.g., Maui is PHOG and OGG; I merge these for purposes of visited airports) and because my visited airport rules have a few quirks (see https://myflightbookblog.blogspot.com/2017/11/how-are-visited-airports-computed.html).
Click to expand...
The visited airports spreadsheet doesn't have enough detail to work with. But it was trivial to use the full logbook CSV and a script to count how many times each tail number visited each place in the route field.
 
iamtheari said:
The visited airports spreadsheet doesn't have enough detail to work with. But it was trivial to use the full logbook CSV and a script to count how many times each tail number visited each place in the route field.
Click to expand...
Right - you'd need to "join" it with a table of your flights using the airport code to do the matching.
 
EricBe said:
Right - you'd need to "join" it with a table of your flights using the airport code to do the matching.
Click to expand...
I didn't think the "visited" table had enough detail to join with the flights table since it only had the first and last dates for each visited airport. Not a real problem worth changing your code (or output CSV data) for when a quick and dirty script could do what I needed from the route field of the flights table. :)
 
iamtheari said:
I didn't think the "visited" table had enough detail to join with the flights table since it only had the first and last dates for each visited airport. Not a real problem worth changing your code (or output CSV data) for when a quick and dirty script could do what I needed from the route field of the flights table. :)
Click to expand...
Exactly, that's where you do the "join" - the visited table has the airport code, and you can "join" on "route contains". You may get a few misses, though (e.g., PHOG will miss OGG, KSFO will miss SFO), but it should be a decent proxy.
 
Garmin FlyGarmin log to Myflightbook?
I have all Garmin devices as well as Garmin pilot. I use the Garmin Log in Pilot and FlyGarmin as it logs even if I forget to start it. I also run a parallel log in Myflightbook as it offers more functionality than GP and I have logs that predate plane ownership in there. The bulk upload works fine and GP lets you create a CSV file to export that MFB can import. The only problem is approaches. For some reason they don't show up in the import. I suspect it's because GP populates the approach airport and type in the "Approach" column in the CSV file vs a digit.
Does this make sense as the reason and if so, is there a suggested workaround? Not that big of a deal, but it helps with the currency calculation.
 
Hang 4 said:
Garmin FlyGarmin log to Myflightbook?
I have all Garmin devices as well as Garmin pilot. I use the Garmin Log in Pilot and FlyGarmin as it logs even if I forget to start it. I also run a parallel log in Myflightbook as it offers more functionality than GP and I have logs that predate plane ownership in there. The bulk upload works fine and GP lets you create a CSV file to export that MFB can import. The only problem is approaches. For some reason they don't show up in the import. I suspect it's because GP populates the approach airport and type in the "Approach" column in the CSV file vs a digit.
Does this make sense as the reason and if so, is there a suggested workaround? Not that big of a deal, but it helps with the currency calculation.
Click to expand...
Send me a sample (myflightbook@gmail.com)? I don't generally detect/import approaches from telemetry data, but maybe I can figure out how to recognize that. Happy Thanksgiving!
 
@EricBe I'll send you a note with the data, but just so you don't get requests for something I wasn't asking about, Flygarmin and Garmin Pilot have a logbook capability similar to Myflightbook. What I was transferring was multiple entries that had approaches manually entered and a CSV file of multiple flights. Was not looking to "autodetect" flying an approach.
 
Just a follow up - Eric fixed this issue. I may be the only person using it, but if you are a Garmin pilot user and also use Myflighbook, this will be helpful. A small amount of manual entry is still required if you are tracking things like approach type, but this eliminates searching multiple entries and cross checking.
 
Hang 4 said:
Just a follow up - Eric fixed this issue. I may be the only person using it, but if you are a Garmin pilot user and also use Myflighbook, this will be helpful. A small amount of manual entry is still required if you are tracking things like approach type, but this eliminates searching multiple entries and cross checking.
Click to expand...
Per private conversation, but now sharing with the broader thread: import now accepts (some) non-numeric values for the "Approaches" column. So if it's numeric - great: 4 = "I did 4 approaches" (described elsewhere). Otherwise, if it starts with a number (e.g., "4 ILS-Y-RWY16L@KSEA") or ends (Garmin format) with a number in parenthesis (e.g., "ILS-Y RWY 16L KSEA (4)"), then on import it will extract the number into the Approaches field and it will put the full text into the "Approach Name(s)" property.
 
@EricBe I had a flight review recently, and have the endorsement in MFB, but it still shows my flight review is expired. I assume because I didn't set the flight review property on the associated flight, is that right? If I go in and add that to the flight now, will it remove the CFI signature?
 
Lindberg said:
@EricBe I had a flight review recently, and have the endorsement in MFB, but it still shows my flight review is expired. I assume because I didn't set the flight review property on the associated flight, is that right? If I go in and add that to the flight now, will it remove the CFI signature?
Click to expand...
Correct - I don't try to parse endorsements because the text can vary. If you add the flight review property to that flight, it will not remove the signature but it will invalidate it. What I suggest doing is either (better) adding the flight review property and asking your instructor to re-sign it, or (not quite as elegant, but still OK) just create an empty flight entry on the same day with no values except for a flight review. That will reset your flight review, and context (next to the actual flight review entry) will explain why there's a random flight review entry.
 
EricBe said:
Correct - I don't try to parse endorsements because the text can vary. If you add the flight review property to that flight, it will not remove the signature but it will invalidate it. What I suggest doing is either (better) adding the flight review property and asking your instructor to re-sign it, or (not quite as elegant, but still OK) just create an empty flight entry on the same day with no values except for a flight review. That will reset your flight review, and context (next to the actual flight review entry) will explain why there's a random flight review entry.
Click to expand...
Thanks, I'll do that. Understood about endorsements but in this case, I used the built in flight review endorsement and thought that would reset it.
 
Yeah, note too that the endorsement is really the record/affirmation of the flight review, but it's the flight that's controlling. Also could be confusing if you do the flight on Jan 31 and your instructor gives you the endorsement on Feb 1, for example.
 
EricBe said:
Yeah, note too that the endorsement is really the record/affirmation of the flight review, but it's the flight that's controlling. Also could be confusing if you do the flight on Jan 31 and your instructor gives you the endorsement on Feb 1, for example.
Click to expand...
Unless there's an FAA opinion on that, I'm going to disagree. A "flight review" might consist of multiple instructional flights and ground sessions in any order. And is not completed until the instructor says it is. I think the date the instructor puts in the endorsement (not necessarily the date the endorsement is entered), is the correct date.
 
Yeah, bad example on my part. Yes, it's complete when the instructor says it is, though I'm having a hard time figuring out how that point doesn't correspond to a flight or ground session (even if there were multiple, and in any order) - and hence to a (dated) entry in the logbook.

My example was where the instructor gives the endorsement on Feb 1 for a completion on Jan 31 but forgets to set the date back a day (from the 1st to the 31st). Bad example because they'd (presumably) do that, bad example because it's a corner case, and bad example because - as you say, if you had both a signed flight indicating a flight review and a back-of-the-logboook flight review, I think the FAA would use whichever date is later (see below).

So perhaps more pragmatic:
  • There are plenty of flight reviews that don't result in any endorsement. A checkride (61.56(d)), WINGS phases (61.56(e)), etc. can be flight reviews.
  • The language of 61.56(c)(2) says "logbook endorsed from an authorized instructor who gave the review certifying that the person has satisfactorily completed the review," and a signed entry that indicates a flight review would count as an "endorsement", no? I.e., while most endorsements are generally at the back of the logbook because they aren't tied to a specific flight or date (think tailwheel endorsement) or for easy lookup, I'm not aware of anything that says that they have to be, or that an "endorsement" can't be right on the entry at which the "endorsement" was earned. Thus I think a signed entry that indicates the completion of a successful flight review would be acceptible to the FAA as a logbook that is endorsed. (Anybody have a different opinion on that?)
  • Lots of people still get paper signed and upload a PDF or JPG of the endorsement. Great for their records, but I can't do anything useful with that w.r.t. computing currency
  • Even though I have templates for endorsements that follow the suggested wording of AC61-65, there's no prohibition against using freeform template (which many people do because they don't see the built-in template) or modifying the template as the instructor sees fit, so I can't count on doing a pattern match to identify the flight review
All of the above are just why I look for a flight review attribute on a flight - it's much more deterministic.

For the record, there are a lot of them. Here's the current list of things that - if attached to a flight - count as flight reviews. Most of these do *not* have a corresponding "back of the logbook" endorsement. (And before anybody whines at me, yes, I know there's officially no such thing as a "Biennial Flight Review"; it's just a synonym for "Flight Review".)
  • AQP - Line Operation Evaluation
  • Biennial Flight Review (BFR)
  • Check-ride Standardization Eval (APART)
  • Checkride - Certified Flight Instructor
  • Checkride - ATP
  • Checkride - Commercial
  • Checkride - Instrument
  • Checkride - Instrument Flight Instructor
  • Checkride - Multi-Engine Flight Instructor
  • Checkride - New Category/Class/Type
  • Checkride - New Rating
  • Checkride - Private Pilot
  • Checkride - Recreational Pilot
  • Checkride - Sport Pilot
  • Checkride: Pilot Proficiency
  • Flight Review
  • Part 121 Check Flight
  • Part 125.287 Competency Check
  • Part 135.293 Competency Check
  • PIC Proficiency Check (FAR 61.58)
  • WINGS Phase Completed
 
@EricBe …. A question regarding printing the logbook.

I have time in FFS during my short stint at Piedmont Airlines, and logged the training using an aircraft defined as shown:

09670375-39C1-4C00-8889-6868C4D6E845.jpeg

When I print the pages of my logbook, I select one of the “added columns” to be FSS.

But that column is not showing the time spent in the sim.

14BDEFC8-7F59-420E-8DD6-3C901501C505.jpeg

Here is a photo of a web entry of one of those flights

image.jpg

What needs doing to get the FFS column to populate with the time I spent in the sim?
 
Log ground sim time for those flights. (Leave Total Time blank). In the example above, you logged 2 hours of Dual and 2 hours of ground instruction, but I'm populating that column from the "Ground Simulator" field if the type of sim matches the column type (i.e., FFS, in this case). I notice you don't have the ground sim field in your screenshot above; you probably want to put that back for your sim flights. Profile->Flight Entry and Display to put it back.
 
EricBe said:
Log ground sim time for those flights. (Leave Total Time blank). In the example above, you logged 2 hours of Dual and 2 hours of ground instruction, but I'm populating that column from the "Ground Simulator" field if the type of sim matches the column type (i.e., FFS, in this case). I notice you don't have the ground sim field in your screenshot above; you probably want to put that back for your sim flights. Profile->Flight Entry and Display to put it back.
Click to expand...
Thanks! I will give that a try
 
Hey, Eric!

I hope that you are doing well. I am still having the lingering problem of a search I did over a year ago popping up every time I try to add a flight. I have to delete that search every time I add a flight, even if I add multiple flights at one time. I have tried to troubleshoot within the system, but it continues to happen. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Abram Finkelstein
N685AS
 
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