Last month, after much experimentation with hand-crafted Excel workbooks and casting about for freeware options, I somewhat resentfully purchased an electronic log book, in an admittedly Quixotic attempt to make some sense of my past life and combine its DNA with that of my recent endeavors. There are inconsistencies between the way that the Navy tracks flight experience and that of the general aviation world that require some creative thinking: Navy doesn’t track “Dual Received” or “Dual Given,” cross-country flights receive no special column of their own flying fast jets, instrument approaches are divided into precision and non-precision categories, further subdivided in to actual or simulated, and daylight hours are inferred from an absence of night time rather than explicitly called out.
On the other hand, civilian log books are wholly innocent of NVG hours and combat time, mission types (air-to-air or air-to-ground?) catapult launches and arrested landings, day or night.
It’s been a bit of a bother, especially with around 4500 hours of flight time to document in 26 different types of aircraft, single and multi-engine, reciprocating, turbine and unpowered, conventional and tricycle landing gear. When I would sit down at night to plunk away at it, two or three months at a time, I often found myself wondering what the hell it was that I was doing. After all, it required a steady application of non-trivial effort, and no one but myself would ever know or care precisely how many hours I had flown in the F-16N (299, as it turns out) or that horrible old Champ (a mere 1.9, before the spinner stopped and I walked out of her life forever), what my best year was (1992, 330 hours filled flying .8s and .9s at six to nine g’s – sometimes more).
But I wanted to know, not least because I became aware of certain inaccuracies carried forward over a number of years, the rectification of which would have required heroic quantities of white out and more calculator math than I cared to personally perform. So now my civilian log book is quite complete, and my military logs are entered up until half-way through 1996, leaving me around five more years to account for. And it’s curious, but the closer I come to wrapping it up – even with much tedious work behind me – the more reticent I come to actually finish.
But along the way I couldn’t help but notice some maturation in my bookkeeping skills. Early on for example, I would find that I had logged instrument approaches without any instrument flight time, or night flights curiously lacking night landings. In time these inconsistencies faded away.
Then there was landing pattern work. Getting aboard the carrier on one’s first attempt, day or night, is the hallmark of a professional carrier aviator, but early in my first tour flying FA-18s in the fleet I was exquisitely aware of certain deficiencies in my landing grade performance. My flight logs dutifully reflect that nearly every shore based flight terminated in several landings at the home field. Rather than coming home from a tactical mission and landing, I had evidently saved a thousand or so pounds of gas that could have been spent doing “fun stuff” grinding it out in the landing pattern, trying to perfect my skills. Having in time become an accomplished carrier aviator, I had largely forgotten the grim and self-imposed requirements of my apprenticeship.
It was a habit that paid important dividends, and it became so ingrained that I took it to my first shore duty rotation in Key West, Florida, at least for my first few months. Until I realized that I wasn’t going to be landing aboard ship any time soon, and certainly not doing so in an A-4E. Who knows, it might have helped on one dreadful day when I had to put the Scooter down on a 4300 foot strip with no arresting gear at either end.
Coming back to Lemoore to refresh in the FA-18, I noted that “Aircraft Commander” hours once again started showing up in their associated column, something I had not much seen since my days as a training command instructor. It was a distinction mostly without a difference in a single-seat fighter and probably had something to do with a contemplated career change to the airlines. I kept it up for a few months into my department head tour, where it faded suddenly and unceremoniously from use.
These numbers standing there in their rows don’t tell you much. They don’t tell you how it feels to be wrapped up in a 1v1 BFM ride, experience a “night in the barrel” or tell you about the things that go through one’s head from the IP to the target. But they do mean something, at least to me. More so as I come towards the end.
Damned if I know what, though.
Well, if my career (though quite different from yours) has any similarity, I imagine all those hours also inhabit your dreams as well, where the mind tugs & pulls, trying to tie up loose ends?
As a guy who has pored over my dad’s logbooks, please do finish your project.
And once you have done so, you might consider linking certain entries to certain events, much as you have done in this entry.
I look and see Dad flying an R4D-8 or an SNB, and wonder, where? Why?
An A-6 hop in green in. Was this one of derring-do, or a strike on a bamboo factory?
You owe it to your son, your family and friends, and posterity to provide information to flesh out the framework the logbooks provide.
Outside of professional rationales, Men have chronicled their acheivements since they figured out that hunks of charcoal could make marks on cave walls. Milepost markers defining existence. You are lucky to have detailed records to trigger memories of concurrent events not in your logs. On past Super Bowl Sunday’s the boys would require me to recount my life on past big game Sundays. Having seen all since the 1st, it was a cool exercise. Long forgotten memories triggered by a succession football games. Since they have left the nest, the allure of the big game has diminished. In fact, today, thank you DVR, Instead of hanging on the talking heads every utterance, I’m off to play with an ex-commie lesbian. I should log it.
Lex, it means you need to fly more aircraft types.
But I can commiserate…I’ve got four logbooks myself. A civilian logbook with my civilian flying, a Navy logbook with what I got going through Test Pilot School as an engineer (~120 hours in 23 types), a notebook with what I bagged working at what became VX-20, and a spreadsheet with UAV time after April of 2008.
Meshing that together will be a PITA.
I’m using Logten Pro myself to log my civilian pilot time and military crew chief time in the same logbook. It took me a couple attempts to get it to do what I wanted, and there’s still some stuff I need to do with it, but overall I’m pleased. Of course, I don’t have either the number of platforms or hours you do.
I wish I had kept copies of the arrestment logs from my Marine Corps days. Talk about joining a Grand Club of our own…in less than four years.
The F-4J in Yuma that took the E-28 gear at 200kt and two-blocked the gear; broke it big time.
The F-8 that trapped at night in a driving Yuma sand storm, and the only reason I knew it trapped was from the reel that started spinning; the rock that smacked me in the face.
The M-21 arrestor engine that self destructed mid trap, snapping a tape and slinging a 75lb tight wrap pressure arm over a thousand feet away; shrapnel embedded in the shack.
The A-6E that fell back to earth on takeoff and trapped at the last second; Airspeed indicator malfunction.
Lead F-4J in a section go, nose just coming off the ground, aborting into the gear due to failed hydraulics; 300′ from the wire to steer to center and get him some.
Days, nights, rain, sand storms, bolters requiring an immediate deck pendant change, squadrons passing through on TransPac to Iwakuni(or the reverse). Deployments to far away, not so exotic locales.
Good stuff, Maynard. Do keep at those logs, Lex…for you and the generations to come.
Aside from proof of currency requirements I’m not sure it has much importance for you to capture the civilian and miltary stuff all in one place. You’ve got the quantity / types of experience in spades. Even the ATP so there’s not much left. (Well, maybe a seaplane rating!)
For me, a walk through the logbook is more qualitative than quantitative. Lesson’s learned, things to avoid, even close calls. Most importantly, it’s a chronicle of the fun of flying. -Sometimes quirky planes and great people along the way. I look at them not so much for nostalgia as to energize me for the next adventure.
Other than what Wilko points, currency and such, the log book is really more for you than anyone else. There are points in your career you can read about in the log and recall some adventure (or terror) and feel good about coming through, and sincerely hoping you never do that again.
Just a thought. Supposedly FedGov is looking for civilian pilots, or according to Yahoo it is. With your background and taildragger checkout, you may have an in for it. Worth checking out if you’re interested in continuing to fly with someone else paying for the go juice.
QM: Are you referring to the Civil Air Patrol?
No. Yahoo listed pilots as one of the fields they are currently looking for people in. I think CAP is an all volunteer org.
With four logbooks of Phantom time, I’ve thought about putting it all on a spreadsheet with comments. The only real reason I could find to do so would be to have a reliable method to know as I drove by the main gate of a base, point at the F-4 on a stick, and know if I had time in that airframe.
I’m guessing that we at Aircraft Targets turned a fair number of those jets into fish condos. Until Homeland Security came around, one used to be able to access an up-to-date online inventory of the DMARC Air Force.
Lex, SWO’s don’t keep logbooks, on account of we measure time in years, not hours (no snark intended, really!) and I have never kept a diary/journal. But sometime around when I became a department head, I started using the standard Navy steno pad as my “wheelbook”. The frequency of inputs depended upon what we were doing, and how we were doing it at the the time. I started one in our Prospective Commanding Officer’s course, with questions I wanted to ask or things I wanted to see when I became “El Supremo”. (Where are the fresh and salt water overpressure relief valves, at what pressure do they open, and where do they relieve to? as an example.) I continued that notebook, and three others in command. As I paged thru them recently in a book case annual purge, I opened them and re-read some of the entries. And what struck me as odd was they were a diary of my 2 years “before the mast” (Richard Henry Dana spent some time in what is now San Diego) and I found them to be intensely personal, highlighting both the high and low points of my most rewarding two years in the Navy. With your SNO in the flight pipeline, I am sure he will get a kick out of reading them, and noting the different colors of ink, and understanding what that means. I would finish it if i were you.
3 full National Account Books 56-231 from Condition III days and nights. Back then I thought I might write a book.
Lex, I can’t believe that you would denegrate a wonderful aircraft by calling her that horrible old Champ. How dare you! I first soloed in a Champ and it was wonderful. Of course, when I soloed in her, she was much younger and spritely. Boss
I must confess that I put Lex onto that bird. I found the people at brown field on a sport pilot website. If I’d known the condition of the equipment, and that you had to hand prop, I wouldn’t have passed the info on.
When Lex told about hand proping the bird, I cringed. I personally do not do such things because of the danger involved, and won’t knowing put someone else in that kind of danger. I’m just glad that Lex got away with it and found some one with better equipment to complete the check out.
Recon I didn’t properly close the italics but, hey, people here are smart enough to get the message.
All better!
The thing about flight logs is they’re sterile. In and of themselves they contain no real useful information, no memories except to those who recorded them, not much to describe what happened.
My great-uncle Walter suffered a heart attack while swing dancing several years ago. He was 88. My grandmother, his sister, has his chest from World War 2. We went through it after his death, looking for things to remember him with. Vintage photographs of he and his crew of a B-17G in, I recall, the US 8th Air Force. Uniforms, ration stamps, Bible, manuals for classes on radios and gunnery and first aid, some keepsakes from England, a log book and a diary. The log book is unremarkable, as I recall. Date, target, duration. Certain entries stick out. Schweinfurt, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Berlin… Yet all I know of those missions is what I’ve read in the history books, or seen in the movies via gun camera footage.
His diary told a tale, one he’d never much related to his kids or siblings or grand-nephews during Sunday dinner’s at my grandmothers place. He would tell us he flew in the big bombers, and punctuate that with a gesture towards the 1:24 scale B-17G model my father had built as a kid and hung from the ceiling in a corner of the living room. Told us he manned the radio, and fired the top machine gun when the going got rough. Said it was cold up there, but the air so clear you could see to forever. Talked of the little specks that didn’t get closer, just got larger and turned into fighters. Talked of the ladies and the USO, the days of boredom and the hours of alertness and the minutes of combat seeming like hours. Of good friends and comrades.
His diary tells of losing friends, ships gone down at 24000 feet with no chutes, flack so thick you could walk on it and cutting bombers in half with a direct hit. Of P-47′s turning back and P-51′s staying on, of FW-190′s and BF-109′s attacking from high and head-on from the sun. Of radios knocked out due to shrapnel, engines lost, crewmen wounded and tended to. Yet even these are sterile and brief, mere summary notes to the real story we all wanted to hear while he smoked his pipe next to the fireside.
A logbook is a record, I suppose, but it’s also a good starting point for relating the tale.
– Max
The LogTenPro app is unique (as far as I know) in that it allows you include photos and journal entries. I’ve exhorted students to keep snapshots in their log books from the git-go, but this multimedia format is far superior. As XBradTC suggested, it could become an heirloom.
I also really like the iPhone client app that syncs with the desktop. Makes it easy to log a flight right after shutdown when details and numbers are fresh.
I’ve recently been going through my Dad’s WW2–and subsequent–logs and memorabilia trying to capture as much as he can recall. At 87 a lot has faded (photos, logs and memories). I’ve concluded you can never keep too much detail, entropy being an irresistible force.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tailspin_tommy/520362848/
I’m contemplating starting one of these up before I get too many hours under my belt in order to avoid the pain of having to do so later. Do you think its worth the investment for a SNA who’s down at Krock to get started with it now?
My vote is definitely yes. The longer you wait the more laborious it becomes. And when you do civilian flying you’ll need a separate log anyway.
After 40+ years and 10,000+ hours going from paper to computer was a huge chore, as Lex so beautifully dscribed. But it was job I needed to do to accurately answer a prospective employer’s questions. I can now tell you how many night multiengine taildragger landings I have, for example (367), or any other weird combination they can throw at me.
Tried a spreadsheet first, when the books were obviously a mess and I had no way of relating different types, categories, class, etc. But the Excel spreadsheet was really ugly, and trying to export a nice looking summary was quite a job.
A purpose-built application was the solution. And bein’ a Mac kinda guy, the answer was obvious after a little Googling.
I just bought it, found a coupon code for $10 off. Looks like a pretty sleek setup.
As an old fool, I can honestly say that I stopped counting after that day at Tchepone Laos.
I flew for another twenty years or so in service of Western and Delta. But they were characterized by V1, rotate, V2. No fun, except in Montana.