Here’s an example of how the new Trips tool works:

STEP 1: Click on “Trips” on the left of the LogTen Pro navigation bar, this is what you’ll see:

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STEP 2: Click the “+” button at the bottom left of the screen to add a new Trip

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STEP 3: You can then either tab through the table itself and enter the details of the trip OR enter details in the “Overview” section lower left of the screen.

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Note that you can choose from a number of different “Types” of time, including Airport Reserve, Business, Commute, Deadhead, Flight Duty, Home Reserve, Non-flying, Personal, Reposition Air or Reposition Ground.

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STEP 4: Enter the Start and End times for the trip. For this example we’re going to use Flight Duty time from 29/09/08 at 1425 through to 30/09/08 at 0325. The flights included in this time-span will automatically appear in the Flight area at the lower right of the screen.

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STEP 5: If you track earnings based on an hourly rate, you can enter this rate in the Overview section and LogTen Pro automatically calculates your earnings.

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STEP 6: You can also track expenses for your trip, whatever the expense, you have total control and flexibility with LogTen Pro Mac. Add or remove expenses simply by clicking the “+” or “-” sign at the bottom left of the Expenses tab.

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Have fun!

The Coradine Support Team

P.S. If you need more guidance with the Trips tool, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

Flights

Takes you to the flight view window, where you can add, remove, sort, and edit your flights. You can drag and drop columns to change their order in the table and use the tab key to quickly enter info into a flight, or enter more detailed info in the detail panel at the bottom. You can even change the names of the fields using Manage -> Configure LogTen Pro menu item (be careful though, because no matter what you change the name to, the function of the field stays the same). For more details see the Customizing LogTen category.

The smart groups and limits panel to the left is another powerful feature that allows you to sort on any data available in your flights, aircraft, types, limits, dates and times. For more about smart groups see the Smart Groups category.

Reports

Opens the Reports window where you can generate, view and print various reports. For more details see the Reports category.

Types

This opens the Aircraft Types window. Many of the standard types of planes are in our database and get automatically recorded for you when you enter their identifier into the Flight view. Here you can view which aircraft and flights have been recorded for each type, and edit details about it. For more details and to learn all the things you can do here, you want to view the Managing Types category.

Aircraft

This will show the flights grouped by your individual aircraft, click on one to see which flights you have entered for that aircraft. Check out Managing Your Aircraft for more information.

Places

Places shows you all the airports you have input in the Flights view. Most of them will have all the location and time zone information automatically entered for you from our database of 27,000+ airports, however you can add your own if you need to. See more at Managing Airports.

People

View and edit the information about the people you fly with. Click on a name to see all the flights they are on and what role they had, add a picture or edit contact details.

Certificates

Keep track of your certificates by type and expiration. You can attach pictures to each one for your reference.

Search

Here you can quickly type in a quick search (Located Here). Looking for all flights with Bob? Just type Bob in the search box and any flights where Bob was a crew member will be displayed. Flights with a certain remark, or aircraft, etc. If it’s something you want to do regularly think about creating a smart group, it will be much faster, as the quick search field has to search many different fields to see if there’s a match.

What to Send Us

FlightLevel 2000 or later
To find your FlightLevel files, look in C:\Program Files\FlightLevelXXXX\Flights where the “XXXX” is the version of Flight Level, probably 2003. Zip up and send us the whole “Flights” folder (it should contain your “.dbf” files).

SkyLog Pro version 5.x
For SkyLog Pro send us your backup file, which should have the .bck extension.

Come fly the [user] friendly skies!

To be clear, in previous versions of LogTen Pro there was a separate “ID” field on the People tab. This has been removed to simplify things, now you can just enter the ID or the Name in the same field! However, in the crew list, and the People tab in Mange Resources you will still be able to see both the name and ID at the same time.

Also note the new handy button to swap the PIC and SIC. This is especially useful if you often fly with the same person but switch rolls. You can set defaults so you’re always added as the PIC or SIC, then just use the button to switch as needed.

You can either use the approach type to enter as much text as you like, so for example you might enter VOR 2; ILS 1; NDB 2. This gets the job done, and may be the simplest approach, however it does not allow you to keep running totals of the various types of approaches you’ve done.

If you want more accuracy, such as the ability to track the exact number for each different type of approach and see running totals for them, then I recommend customizing some of the custom operations fields. If you click the “Configure” button in the toolbar and then go to the “Operations” tab, you’ll find that there are ten custom fields that you can change to whatever you like. So you could make separate fields for ILS, NDB, VOR, all the types you want to track, then for each flight simply enter the number in each box!

By entering the Aircraft ID first you’re much more efficient because there’s no need to enter the type, whereas if you enter the type first then you still have to enter the id… So ultimately the point is, I highly recommend you arrange your columns so that the Aircraft ID comes BEFORE the Aircraft Type and you always enter the Aircraft ID first.

In LogTen Pro 5 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 27,000 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.

Type: B752 (this is generally a short identifier combining the make and model, like C-172 for a Cessna 172)
Make: Boeing
Model: 757-200
Engine Type: Jet
Category: Airplane
Class: Multi-Engine Land

Now if I fly a fleet of 757′s in the Aircraft tab I just enter the Aircraft ID, and select the type, and I don’t have to specify that it’s a Multi-Engine Jet Airplane for every Aircraft I enter. For each individual aircraft, I can then track things that are unique about that particular aircraft.

More than meets the eye!

LogTen Pro’s powerful bi-directional linking means that not only is a flight “linked” to an aircraft (meaning a change in the aircraft entry updates in every flight) but that an aircraft, and even an aircraft type knows the flights that it’s linked to and can quickly display information based on this. Check out the status display at the bottom of each of the tabs of the Resource Manager, you’ll be able to see quick stats such as the number of flights and total time in any particular aircraft!

This is very important, because it determines how your times by type are calculated… So you need to have each of your “Aircraft Types” be unique. If you have more than one with the same “Type” then you can’t select the right one for a particular aircraft.

Handling Simulators

If you fly a simulator make sure you select the appropriate value for the Category, such as “Simulator” or “PCATD” (Personal Computer-based Aviation Training Device). Since aircraft types must be unique, if you also fly the real thing, I suggest adding something like “S” or “Sim” to the aircraft type so that it can be clearly identified for flights and reports. So if our example above were a simulator you could enter it as B752SIM.

Alternatively you could create an Aircraft and set it’s ID to something like B752SIM, and then just select the B752 type, however this will have the side effect of including your sim time with all other B752 time when viewing Time by Type reports.

Enter a flight with totals for each aircraft type

To enter past totals just create one or more flights and enter the total times you’d like to use as starting points, you can set the date to whatever you like (probably the date of the last flight included in the total would make sense). You can decide how much detail you want, e.g. you simply enter one flight and set the appropriate totals (1139 PIC, 874 Night, etc.) or you could add a separate flight for each aircraft type to be more precise.

A Note About Times Like Jet, and Multi-Engine Land…

Because LogTen Pro automatically tracks time by type, such as Multi-Engine, Jet, etc, if you want these totals to be correct It’s important to specify the correct type for your balance forward entries. Because we’re just concerned with Engine Type, Category and Class you can simply create some generic types that cover all Jet, Multi-Engine Land, Airplane…

If You Use Reports That Display Each Type of Time as Day and Night…

If you plan to use reports that break time down into day and night, such as the Canadian or South African reports, then when you enter a balance forward you should make a separate entry for each type of time. E.g. one for your PIC/P1 totals (including night), one for SIC/P2, one for Dual, etc. Otherwise the reports will see PIC, SIC, Dual and Night all on the same flight and it will be unable to calculate the day/night totals correctly.

In most cases we, as pilots, will need to enter the same value for several types of flight time, and these will be the same for a certain phase of our flying. For example, a student will most likely be entering the same values for Total Time and Dual Received on every flight, at least until they start flying solo. On the other hand, most airline pilots will be entering XC on every flight, so why should they have to type it in every time they enter a flight? They don’t if they’re using LogTen Pro of course.

Most airline pilots will be entering XC on every flight, so why should they have to type it in every time they enter a flight? They don’t have to if they’re using LogTen Pro…

Select the “Time” tab in the Flight Detail view and at the top right press the “Auto” button. Checkboxes will appear next to all your time values. Tick the ones you would like to be automatically updated when the total time changes (you can always override the value if you want it to be different from the total time).

Now whenever the Total Time value is changed, either by typing in a new value, or by changing the Actual Departure or Actual Arrival times the ticked times will be updated as well. When you make that first solo, or get that sweet airline job you’ve worked so hard for, just go back to the Time tab and change it as needed.