Moving from a paper logbook to a digital one

How to bring years of handwritten flights into a digital logbook without losing accuracy, and what to do with the paper afterwards.

You do not have to retype everything

The single thing that stops pilots switching is the thought of typing in fifteen years of flights. You do not need to. There are two honest approaches, and both are accepted practice.

• Carry your totals forward: enter your hours so far as a starting balance, and log new flights from today
• Import the detail: if your flights already exist in a spreadsheet or another app, bring them across as a CSV file

Carrying totals forward

This is what most pilots do. During setup you enter your total hours and then break them down, pilot in command, dual, night, IFR, cross country, landings, and those become your opening balance. Every new flight adds to it, and your statistics and licence progress are correct from day one.

Take the figures straight from the last totals page of your paper logbook, so the two agree exactly.

Importing the detail

A CSV import brings flights across one row at a time. caeloo previews what it read, lets you map your columns onto its own, and flags duplicates before anything is written, so a bad import is never a mess to clean up.

Keep the paper

Do not throw the old logbook away. It is your original record, and its signatures and endorsements cannot be recreated. Store it somewhere safe, keep logging digitally, and print an EASA style PDF whenever an examiner or employer wants pages to look at.