Logging hours
 

Hey - just a quick question.

Flying the other week, my instructor logged the hours flown in 1.6, 1.3 etc. and I usually do it as 1 hour 5 mins etc.

Could someone explain the conversion in simpleton words please....

cheers

Ian

This is one of those questions that will generate as many answers as there are people :O

I think the origin of the "1.3" method is from writing down the tacho/hobbs time. It is very common.

If you own your own plane and look after the maintenance, and use the CAA logbooks, they have columns for "hours" and "minutes" in which case you may prefer to log your flying time as say 1:25 (1hr 25 mins) also.

Obviously the 1st method is easier to add up. The second one is harder unless you have a hh:mm calculator or a spreadsheet whose cells can be formatted to hh:mm...

Otherwise, it is of no consequence.

I log my hours in 1.3, 1.8 etc too. Not sure if this is mandatory ??


Anyway, the converstion is as follows.....

Number of minutes / 60


eg 1 hr 38 mins would be 1 + (38/60) = 1.63



to do it other way round, just x by 60,

eg 1.63 would be 1 + (.63x60) = 1 hr 38 mins

:ok:

6 minutes = 0.1 hour

Either log in 5 minute chunks or 6 minute chunks. Anything more accurate is a total waste of time and effort.

After years of logging minutes and trying to find calculators that work in minutes I gave up, and find decimal much simpler.

Its your choice.

I use a calculator that does degrees, minutes and seconds (any respectable scientific calculator will). It doesn't care that actually I am adding up hours!

Tim

Keep it simple, as your logbook fills you'll appreciate it.

6 minutes = 0.1 hour & then round up or down to the nearest 0.1

Therefore, 1h 15 mins = politically correct 1.2, or over keen 1.3? (1.25 in reality)

YYZ

Swedish rounding is the system traditionally used, which means you round UP when it is half way between. There is a more accurate system that requires you to round up half the time and round down half the time. However, using the swedish rounding,

1:15 equals 1.3

And for a semi-official view on the matter, the front of my Airservices Australia logbook says this:

mins = hours
0-2 = 0.0
3-8 = 0.1
9-14 = 0.2
15-20 = 0.3
21-26 = 0.4
27-32 = 0.5
33-38 = 0.6
39-44 = 0.7
45-50 = 0.8
51-56 = 0.9
57-60 = 1.0

As always, YMMV.

The school where I did my PPL used to log time to the nearest 5 minutes, but charge decimal time. They had a conversiont table they used, which, off the top of my head, went something like:

05 min = .1
10 min = .2
15 min = .3
20 min = .3
25 min = .4
30 min = .5
35 min = .6
40 min = .7
45 min = .7
50 min = .8
55 min = .9

I think the main thing to take from this thread, though, is that there are so many different ways of converting - but at the end of the day no one really cares so long as it is roughly right.

FFF
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Brilliant - thanks again