Logging Night Hours
 

Hello

I have recently started flying for an airline and have a few questions regarding hour logging, specifically logging night time!

Put very simply, when conducting a flight which starts in the light and ends in the dark, how much of that flight do I log as night?
Is it satisfactory to put a ball part figure down or should I get anal and work out to the nearest minute? If the latter is the case, how do I establish this anal figure? (Is there a handy website detailing official night time someone could point me to? Also if travelling east/west, how do you work out when the sun went down for that flight?)


Many thanks

GM

Mate - just head off into the room of mirrors and have a good long hard look at yourself - and what you've written. You're stressing over nothing!
Then just have a guesstimate at the night component - like the rest of us do.

Fair point.
I suppose that was the answer I was looking for!
No anal-ness required then!!

Cheers

Have found this website useful if you want to estimate night hours a little more accurately

www.cmpsolv.com/los/sunset.html

In our operations we start the elapsed timer at the moment of push-back, and leave it running until shut-down.

When it gets dark (or light), I simply note in my log book the day (or night) time flown so far on the sector, the balance at the end of the flight is night (or day).

Double sunsets on a long West - East flight can be a problem:}

Regards,

Old Smokey

As FAA is concerned, night time is the time between (almanac) sunset+30 to sunrise-30. As far as JAR is concerned, I am happy and clueless :-)

Thanks people.
Some useful tips on deducing the figure there.

Cheers

GM

Perhaps you should refer back to your ATPL notes. It is in there!

It is also the same time at which you ensure that the nav lights are on!

I tend to fudge it by simply doing a very simple interpolation between sunset at departure and sunset at destination and using departure time to decide on a rough time when it was night.

As for noting when you see the sunset - good idea provided you make an allowance for the aircraft altitude. i.e. sunset at 35000 is long after sunset at the surface (where it counts).

Regards,

DFC

You only need to look out of the window - if its dark its night and vice versa. Unless you need a certain number of night hours for a rating no-one gives a stuff what you put into your log-book so don't worry about it ! If I fly a sector that involves night flying I just make a rough approximation when I scribble the flight time in my diary - simple as that and usually worked out ot the nearest fifteen minutes - makes totalling up so much easier.

Old Smokey: ROTF LMAO :}