Creating the Smart Group

Quick

1. Creat a new Smart Group
2. Name it “BFR”
3. Set the date to 720 “Days”
4. Set the criteria to Notes -> Flight Review -> is -> [tick the box]
5. Tick “Treat criteria as [Minimums] for the period”
6. Click OK

The Details

We need a smart group much like the default currency groups. Click the “gear” icon at the lower left of the main window to create a new Smart Group. Now in this case we’ll set it up for a biennial flight review, but you can change the time frame as desired.

Now that you have the group, give it a useful name, like “BFR”, and set the date to “720″, then select “Days” in the menu.

Note

We specify it in days because we want it to be specific to the day. Remember that the date increment also effects granularity, meaning that if I selected 2 years, and today was 11-Dec-2006 then the group would match flights back to 1-Jan-2003 because it’s looking for WHOLE years. The same applies to months, which is important if you need to track something, say total time within the last 12 months rolling from the first of the month to today.

Set the criteria to use the “Notes” category, then the “Flight Review” field (a.k.a. “key”), since this is a checkbox field the only option for the “operator” is “is”. Now simply tick the box to indicate we’re looking for flights which have the Flight Review check box ticked.

Make sure you tick the “Treat criteria as Minimums for the period” this will make the result displayed next to the group be the number of days left for the group, otherwise it will just show the total time for the matching flights.

That’s it, click OK to close the Smart Group editor sheet.

Entering a Flight Review

Now you’ve got a group to track them, all you need to do is select the flight when the review took place, and tick the “Fligth Review” box on the Notes tab.

Now whenever you have a flight review, just tick the box, and your currency will stay, well, current.

LogTen Pro can handle this quite nicely, here’s how you do it:

In the “notes” section of the flight detail view there’s an “IPC” check box, first off tick that.

A “minimums” or currency smart group has to take into account all the criteria (e.g. you have to have 6 approaches AND 1 hold to be current, just having one or the other is not enough, however, and this is important, the “any” selection above the criteria means that they don’t have to be on the SAME flight… if it was “all” then you would have to have 6 approaches and 1 hold on the same flight). So just adding the IPC criteria to the existing instrument group won’t achieve the desired effect because then you’d have to have the IPC AND the six approaches AND the one hold (although not necessarily on the same flight!)…

OK, so here’s how go about it:

• Create a new smart group
• Name it something useful like “IPC”
• Set the time period you want, 6 months, whatever…
• Set the criteria to Notes -> IPC -> is -> [ticked]
• Tick the “Treat criteria as minimums for the period” box

You now have a new currency group that shows your currency based on IPC. Now you can take this a step further, since you don’t really want two different instrument currency groups, this is an _alternate_ way to be considered current, so… simply drag and drop your new IPC group into your existing Instrument group. Now double click the instrument group, and at the bottom you’ll see: “This group contains sub groups, match of their criteria.” Change the to “Any”. Now that means that instrument currency will look at it’s sub groups as well to determine currency.