Logbook Database

[Ralph]

I'm creating my own electronic logbook and I wanted some comments on the data rules I am making.

Total time is calculated from the following

Day time + Night time

which is equal to

IFR (simulated and/or actual) time + VFR time

for a given flight.

For each flight I can select the following as checkbox type values

PIC yes/no
SIC yes/no
Dual given yes/no
Dual received yes/no
X-country yes/no

This should only be a problem if only a portion of the flight is PIC, SIC, Dual or X-country. I don't think this will come up (it hasn't yet at least)

Any comments?

 

[midlifeflyer]

A couple (having gone through the exercise myself).

>For each flight I can select the following as checkbox type values

This was my original spec. It sounded good when I did it, but it turned out to be more efficient for various purposes to have the times captured. It also worked out much much better when doing calculations based on totals to work with the hard numbers. I can't remember all of the situations where I ran into a problem with the checkbox only method, but one is raised by your post:

>PIC yes/no
>SIC yes/no

The PIC/SIC issue did come up for me. Let's suppose you are doing safety pilot stuff with a friend and your rule is that the safety pilot is not PIC. On one flight you will have both times to capture.

I solved the tension between ease of entry and data capture on the entry form. Unlike your plan, I enter "Total Time" first rather than calculating it from other fields.

I have a yes/no checkbox on the form. Clicking a "Yes" on "cross country" for example, pre-fills the cross country time entry with the total time, so it's fast entry, but I can still edit it time if appropriate.

There are some areas where mutual exclusion will be the rule ( a flight is either cross country or it isn't), but having decided to go with numeric fields for things like Actual/Sim/Day/Night, it also made sense to me from a deign perspective to do it with the other fields as well, especially given some of the calculation issues I found years after the original version was done. (BTW I don't capture "day" — "day" is simply "not night")