Logging modes of flight
 

Hello all! I'm just starting on this site and trying to get my aviation career geared towards civilian flying after Army flying.

It seems, to me, that logging time seems like a fuzzy area. Can anyone answer this: If I log a 3.0 flight and during that flight I fly Hood and Night, can I log 3.0 of Hood AND 3.0 of Night or just 3.0 of one or the other?

You can log it however you want....how long were you under the hood and how much of the flight was at night. Don't think that because you were flying for 3.0 means you only can break down the 3.0. You could have 2.8 of hood time and 3.0 of night. Total is 5.8 but it was a 3.0 flight. Does this make more sense?


Illini

Thanks for the info.

Yes, that makes perfect sense. This was a long discussion the other day with a group of pilots and everyone had a different answer. Is there an FAR that covers it?

Army Flyer, you're right, people make logging time fuzzy. Not sure how the army logs time, on the civvy side it's pretty much a spreadsheet. The big column is total time, all your flights, lighter than air, rotorcraft, glider, airplane, whatever. People have columns for the different categories and classes of aircraft, airplane single engine land, helo, glider, balloon, etc. All of those columns should equal your total time. There will be another set of columns for your position during the flight, PIC, SIC, F/E, Dual Given (CFIing), Dual Recieved (Student). Yes, there are times you can be recieving instruction and still log PIC and folks now seems hung up on ways to log another 10 hours of PIC time but the last time I got any instruction in an aircraft I was rated in was almost 20 years ago and all of those columns in my log book also equal TT. I have a separate column of sim time that doesn't count towards the TT. Finally there are columns for conditions of flight. Night, IFR, Hood, Cross Country, NVG, Aerobatic whatever. These numbers are stand alone and won't add up to anything. I think this is where your question is. If you're flying at night, that's one column. If you're under the hood it doesn't matter much if it's day or night outside but it's still night and you're under the hood so you've got two entries. If you take off at midnight, do five T+Goes, head off X-C, wear a hood for thirty minutes and land at your destination at 2am you could log 2 hours TT, 2 hours night, an hour of X-C and .5 of hood.

The FARs do not tell you how to log time, you can do anything you want.

However...flight time which is required for currency or to meet the aeronautical experience requirements for a cert or rating must meet the specification of the FAR in question.

For example, the definition of cross-country varies depending on whether you are a student pilot, and ATP applicant, or applying for a part 135 job. PIC time can be logged under a variety of conditions also.

Also employers prefer that you stick to the FAR definitions so they can more easily evaluate and compare your experience. If you log a bunch of weird stuff, interviewers will be annoyed at least, and might consider it falsification depending on the situation.


Some folks might log total time when they are not PIC, SIC, Safety Pilot, Instructor, Student, or Flight Engineer. I would probably not do this...if your status on board the aircraft does not fit into one of those categories you are basically going for an airplane ride as far as most employers are concerned.


You can log multiple flight conditions at the same time, ex night IMC XC.

When logging hood time, subtract a few tenths from the total flight time for taxi, TO, and LDG.

I think the key here is that most of these columns are not mutually exclusive. On a 3 hr flight, you may have 2.0 of simulated instrument, .4 actual instrument, 1.5 of night, and 3.0 of dual received and PIC.

61.51 is the best guidance we have for how to log certain types of flight time, but my best advice is to go to each column and put down how much of the flight fell under that category.

All,

Thanks for the input. It really helps a lot. My main goal is not to look unprofessional when I walk in for my first interview and try to be as squared away as one can be. You've all be awesome with the info.

I don't understand the relationship between those two sentences. Either you log "anything you want" in which case you have a personal diary, or you log flight time for currency and requirements, in which case you have a professional document. If the goal is the latter, FARs tell you what you may log in pretty good detail. 61.51 for flight time; 61.57 for landings and approaches (and a couple of other instrument tasks); 61.1(b)(3) doe the various types of cross countries; the various certificate or rating specific tasks in the regs for those certificates and ratings.

If we want to be a little more precise, the definition of cross country time varies depending on what you are using the time =for= not really on what certificate you hold or what you are working on at the time. For example, a student pilot who is thinking in career terms is more than welcome to start logging his 135-qualifying cross countries from his first solo to another airport. Probably doesn't make sense to use the same cross country column as for those landing >50NM flights, but that's bookkeeping, not regulation.

Maybe I missed the point?