Harnessing the power of “Smart Groups”

Smart Groups is one of the most powerful features of LogTen Pro. Smart Groups lets you quickly view your totals based on any attribute of your flight. So you can easily and quickly see totals in the left hand  ‘groups’ column of the LogTen Pro “Flights” View.

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When you launch Logten Pro 5 for the first time, you start off with a few standard smart groups including Currency information for Day/Night and Instrument time. As well as duty limits including 12 months and 28 days.

These standard Smart Groups are the tip of the iceberg! Dig a little deeper and you will find an incredibly flexible and versatile tool which enables you to:

• Track totals for ANY criteria you choose, and you can customize criteria specific to your situation … want to see flights logged with night time greater than 2 hrs in a B757? No problem.
• Look forward and back in time – so you can make a “30 in 7″ duty limit that looks back 6 days and forward 24 hours for example
• Set maximums for currency groups, enabling you to handle currencies that require a certain amount of one thing but no more then X of another. E.g. 3 hours total instrument, but no more then 1 hour simulated.
• Choose from several options for what data to display next to the group, instead of just Total Time you can choose from PIC Time, Landings, or a count of matching flights

Here’s an example of how to do it:

STEP 1: Click the “+” button at the bottom left of the main screen. Alternatively click “File” >> “New Smart Group”.

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STEP 2: Name your smart group. For this example, we’re going to sort for Noah based on Aircraft type (C172) and time logged as PIC. So we’ll name the group Noah PIC in C172.

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STEP 3: Set the date range. You can look back as well as forward to keep an eye not only on where you’ve been but make sure you’re not hitting limits any time in the near future. For this example, we’re going to look at PIC time logged in C172 for the last 12 months.

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STEP 4: Choose your criteria. Please play around with this, you’ll see that with the ability to customize criteria, you can pretty much sort based on anything your heart desires. For this example, we choose Aircraft, Aircraft Type and Begins with C172 … then we hit the “+” button to add a second set of criteria.

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STEP 5: We set a second criteria for “Crew”, “PIC”, “Begins with”, Noah.

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Note the new feature in LogTen Pro 5 below the criteria field. There is a box that you can tick to “Treat criteria as” minimums or maximums. This enables you to easily track goals or limits. For an example of how to use this feature, please click here.

STEP 6: If you wish, you can manually key-in color thresholds to let you know when we’re getting close to your specified limit or goal.

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Click OK and voila, your new smart group is tracking your totals.

P.S. If you want help setting up a more complicated Smart Group or further guidance, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team!