Managing Airports in LogTen Pro

How to get the most out of LogTen Pro’s airport management features

In LogTen Pro 3 you can manage a database of airports. When you enter a From or To value for a flight it looks for a match in the airport database (the Airports tab of the Resource Manager). If it doesn’t find one it will search the internal database of over 15,000 airports worldwide, if it finds a match it will create a new entry in your airports list in the Resource Manager and copy the data from the internal database, if the field is STILL not found it will simply create a new empty entry in your airports list and set it’s ICAO ID to whatever you entered in the “From” or “To” field.

The “From” and “To” fields are much more than just a few characters, it’s a link to a specific airport that allows LogTen Pro to do things like calculate the distance of your flights, instantly change how your “From” and “To” fields are displayed (in the Preferences you can select from ICAO, IATA, or Name) as well as a reverse relationship to every flight that uses it so that you can look at a particular airport and instantly see how many arriving and departing flights you have.

From and To airports should always be a single airport identifier. Route information should be entered in the “Route” field.

Many pilots like to record a days flying as a single entry, and it is not uncommon to see a sequence of sectors in the “From” or “To” field. For example on a flight from Denver International Airport to Seattle’s SeaTac Airport via Los Angeles International and Phoenix Sky Harbour you might see something like this in the “From” field: KDEN-KPHX-KLAX and then KSEA in the “To” field. As you may have already guessed from the first paragraph, this will result in a new airport being created in your list with the ICAO ID of “KDEN-KPHX-KLAX”: not good. So the next time you go to enter a flight to KPHX, you’ll get “KDEN-KPHX-KLAX” auto entered because it found a match!

So the way it was designed, you would enter the starting point, and the end point, and then enter route information in the route field. Note that at any time you can choose “Get Airport Data” under the Manage menu to fill in missing data from the internal database where available. This means if you’ve got an airport with just and ID, such as KDEN, running this command will look up KDEN in the internal database and fill in the IATA, the Name, Lat, Lon, City, State, Country etc if the information is available.

What if I Already Entered My Data This Way?

If you’ve got a bunch of data entered in this fashion, and you need to clean it up. The best thing to do, is export your flights to tab delimited file, then open it in a spreadsheet application like MS Excel for cleanup. Here you can create a calculated field to just grab the first identifier from your list of fields (”From” in our example above) and make a new, single identifier, “From” field. Then you can import your data back into a new empty file in LogTen Pro importing the old from information into the “Route” field and your new “cleansed” from information into the “From” field.