I just got my private license in late February and I got an account on here because I often come up with questions that I have nowhere to find the answer. Now that I have my wings, I just wanted to get everyone's opinion on this. On a cross country flight in a plane with a gps, how many private pilots actually fill out a nav log and keep track of headings, leg times, etc? Obviously I understand that it is a good practice to always know where you are and how much fuel you have (how long you have been flying) if the gps were to fail, I just wanted to get an idea of how many private pilots actually go through the steps of completing a nav log. Thanks.

 

I'm going to go out on limb here and say that most pilots don't fill out and track a flight log on shorter cross country flights. I'm not saying you shouldn't, especially on longer flights to places that are new to you. I think the GPS is irrelevant in the decision making process on whether to fill out a flight log. You should always do your planning though and examine the weather while keeping an idea of your progressive fuel monitoring. Always know where the weather is as well as your back up airports.

While GPS is great, I find it has kept a lot of newer experienced pilots "heads-down" with a dependence on electronic navigation. The 'see-and-avoid" concept hinges on a pilot's ability to keep his/her eyes outside of the cockpit as much as possible, so anything that pulls a pilots' eyes away from the outside can, in my opinion, be considered a degrading factor to this concept.

Nowadays, though, there are plenty of basic tablet applications that allow a pilot to quickly determine their time/fuel/distance calculations, so it's definitely much easier to flight plan and track than it was.

Best of luck.

 

The real benefit of those logs today is to allow a student pilot to develop a quantitative understanding of how wind/distance/AS/fuel inter-relate. So not really needed to maintain the log once you're done training, if it's a shorter flight.

On a longer flight, it can keep you from running low on fuel so may be a good idea to use it, since fuel gauges in GA airplanes are not very accurate.

A shortcut is to draw a straight line from DEPT to DEST, and use that bearing and forecast winds to calculate an average wind component along the entire route. Then add up the mileage along your route, and apply the calculated average wind component to your total mileage. This will get you very close to the total time and fuel burn you would have come up with doing it leg by leg, assuming the winds are fairly constant along the route and there's major geography like passes or mountains which will change the winds significantly along a particular leg. This is what I do for a GA XC.