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Old 18th Mar 2011, 16:26
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Genghis the Engineer
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Join Date: Feb 2000
Location: UK
Posts: 14,202
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I already do something similar for much the same reasons as you.

A few thoughts from me:

- chart validity I'd not thought of, nice idea, I may have to steal that.

- I also show licence and medical currency, biennial dates

- I have mine calculate 28, 90 and 365 day recency, which ally with the questions AAIB ask in their reports, and I think is a more useful measure for true currency than 90 day alone.

- I currently have about 1150 hours over roughly 1300 flights, and Excel copes with that without any trouble whatsoever, so unless you have 10,000+ hours, I'd not worry about slowing Excel up, it's pretty robust. Current filesize is 1.4Mb; I don't have any pictures in it. Maybe one day, but that really will increase the filesize.

- I keep adding extra columns for things that interest me, for example tailwheel hours, JAR complex hours, FAA high performance hours... You can do that in Excel, it's great!

- I also add up hours on type, and maintain a list of types flown, hours on various groups (single engine Cessnas, single engine Pipers, vintage taildraggers...) Currently up to 17 columns in my Excel logbook, which works fine.

- I can't honestly say I like recording airfields by ICAO identifier in my logbook, I prefer names! No reason not to do both of course.

- I do like to get all of the main points (hours, types, recency, medical) down on one printable A4 page so that I can hand/email this to anybody when I'm seeking permission to fly their aeroplane.

- Stick to the columns and categories that matter to you NOW, add extra as you need them. For example, the odds are that you're years away (if ever!) from logging multi-pilot time, so why bother wasting space on it; ditto floats. Also, aeroplanes fall into categories - so for example certainly include tailwheel, but if you have a JAA licence you may wish to include "complex" or in FAAland "high performance".

G
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