For my entire flying ‘career’ (as it were) I have kept only one logbook. I bought my logbook in 1990, when CASA was the Civil Aviation Authority. At the time of writing this post I have flown just on 400 hours in GA and RAAus aircraft, which occupies 16 pages of my CAA Pilot’s Logbook.

One logbook for 35 years! I have moved house twice, moved overseas, returned to Australia and moved house again. It's sheer good luck that I haven't lost it. My entire flying history kept in one precious book.

As I’m sure many of us have done, I have kept photocopies and, more recently, scanned copies of my logbook pages. But there must be a better way, yes? Why not keep our logbooks online? Why not just keep an Excel spreadsheet?

Keeping online logbooks is possible but it’s not as simple as you might think. Let’s see what CASA and RAAus have to say about this.

CASA’s Requirements

The requirements regarding logging flight data for pilots are in Part 61 of the CASRs (Civil Aviation Safety Regulations). Regulation 61.345 sets our obligation to keep a logbook and to update it ‘as soon as practicable after completing each flight’. Reg 61.345 also sets out what information needs to be logged which, unsurprisingly, is reflected by the many columns set out in our CASA logbooks.

All good so far. Nothing about online yet.

Regulation 61.355 says we need to keep our logbooks for seven years after the date of the last entry made in it. That means permanently for me! At the rate I’m going this is the only (paper) logbook I’ll ever have. We’ll come back to 61.355 in a jiffy.

It’s not until we get to reg 61.365 that CASA brings up online logbooks. Regulation 61.365(1) states that you must hand your logbook to CASA within seven days of being asked to do so. Regulation 61.365(3) states that pilots who keep logbooks online can satisfy a 61.365(1) CASA request printing out your online logbook and certifying each page as a true reflection of your hours flown.

Finally, online stuff!

So far we’re all good with our Excel logbook. It won’t take much for us to print out our Excel spreadsheet. If we’re savvy enough we can even print out a signing box in the header or footer of each page.

All good, right? Right??

Umm, no.

The issue arises in two places. Firstly, Regulation 61.355(2)(b) requires you to ‘ensure that each entry in the logbook is retained unaltered’. This is where Excel falls over. There is no way to ensure online logbook entries are never changed. In fact, the opposite is the case - it’s really easy to alter records in Excel.

What about RAAus RPC holders?

The CASRs we discussed above don’t apply to the RAAus context. An RAAus RPC is not a ‘pilot licence’ according to the CASR (see the definition of ‘pilot licence’ in reg 61.010).

So, we turn to the RAAus Operations Manual (version 7.2.2 at the time of writing). Here we find a requirement for all RAAus members to maintain a ‘pilot logbook’, which is defined on page 12 of the Manual. Section 2.02(1) sets out what must be kept in a logbook. Unsurprisingly, it is very similar to what is set out in CASR 61.345.

There’s nothing explicit in the Ops Manual to preclude the use of online logbooks but there are certainly parts of that Manual that assume logbooks are in paper form. For example, section 2.02(3) states that entries must be made ‘accurately, legibly and in ink’, and, on completion of a flight review an ‘RAAus Examiner must make an entry into the pilot’s logbook’ to indicate the flight review was completed successfully (2.07(5)(b)).

Now, an Examiner could ‘make an entry’ online, and a pilot could also print out pages of a logbook ‘legibly and in ink’ on a printer. Still, unlike the CASRs, online logbooks are not dealt with explicitly – they’re neither excluded or included. This leaves us in a bit of an uncertain space.

RAAus also doens’t require you to ensure your logbook entries are ‘unalterd’ as per CASR 61.355(2)(b). That said, I wouldn’t suggest taking the lack of integrity provisions in the Ops Manual as permission to go full-on Excel. While RAAus has some autonomy it is still responsible to CASA. There are obviously good reasons to ensure the integrity of your own logbook, online or not.

In short, for RAAus a conservative approach would be to keep a paper logbook only. I wouldn’t say an online logbook is not permitted though, at least not explicitly.

What Can We Do?

In short, Excel is out. We can't ensure an Excel spreadsheet is 'retained unaltered'. Those of us who store our Excel spreadsheets on OneDrive (or Google Sheets on Google Drive) get version history. However, version histories are easy to fudge or remove and, in my view, are not sufficient to satisfy the 'retained unaltered' requirement.

Retaining entries unaltered online is actually quite difficult. It’s something that programmers need to made extra effort to implement, by either preventing you from editing your logbook entry or by providing an audit trail. So, if you really do want to keep your logbook online your best option is to subscribe to a commercial provider.

There are a number of software providers, some based in Australia, who offer online logbook subscriptions, some for free. These range in sophistication from fancy spreadsheets to sophisticated desktop and mobile apps. While these are worth investigating you should reach out to the provider and confirm with them that they meet all the CASA requirements. CASA will fine you and not them if you don’t meet the CASR requirements.

If you’ve been keeping your own logbook in an Excel spreadsheet, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. At a minimum, do as I did and copy your logbook entries into your paper logbook as you go.

On a bit of a tangent, when I moved from my paper logbook to my online version I paid one of my teenage daughters to enter the data from my logbook into my (then) spreadsheet. She gave me an extra six hours’ flying time…

Be safe out there. Especially if you have teenage children with data entry ambitions.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this post or if you need any legal advice.

Mark