Click for larger view

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”.

Click for larger view

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.

Click for larger view

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.

Click for larger view

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.

Click for larger view

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

Click for larger view

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.

Click for larger view

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!

Now if you want to know your Tailwheel time you simply create a new Smart Group by clicking the “+” button at the bottom of the groups list, and set it up like this:

Now you can always see your total “Tailwheel” time next to the group, and when you select it it will show only flights that match, and ALL your totals at the bottom of the table will be “Tailwheel” totals so you can see at a glance how many Tailwheel landings you have, how many hours PIC, etc.

You can use Smart Groups to “filter” your time just about any way you can imagine!

How to make keeping track of your duty limits as painless as possible…

LogTen Pro allows you to create powerful duty limits groups. If you’re like many professional pilots, you’ll find this to be a big help. For example, at some companies pilots cannot fly more than 55 hours in any consecutive 7 day period, however if they rest for 3 days then the limit starts over. You can do this with LogTen Pro using the Consecutive Days date option in a Duty Limit or “maximums” Smart Group.

It would look like this:

Once you’ve created this group it will show the number of hours remaining until you reach your limit. The value will update every time you open LogTen Pro, or if you just finished a session of entering flights you can refresh it simply by clicking on it.

Give it a whirl, and if you have any questions, shoot me an email!

Cheers,

Noah

No matter what you’re working toward, with LogTen Pro it’s easy to keep track of your goals.

How do I accomplish this you ask? It’s easy, all with the magic of Smart Groups. Here’s how:

[This example tracks a goal of 50 hours of Cross Country PIC/P1 time for flights over 50 nautical miles.]

Basically you set your target, and any additional criteria, and tick the box at the bottom to “Treat criteria as Maximums for the period”. Create a new group for each of your targets, then you can see next to each the hours remaining until you reach the limit or “goal”. These values will update every time your document is first opened and whenever you click on the group.

In the above example we don’t specify anything for the date range so it will look at all our flying. If we want to set a goal for a specific time period, you can specify a date range. e.g. I need to log 20 hours in the sim next month… Or maybe I need to log 10 hours of dual received in any given 6 month period, the possibilities are endless.

Basically a smart group can have criteria for any attribute of a flight, and so ANY change to a flight could effect ANY group. This would mean that inorder to keep them up-to-date in real time every group would have to be re-calculated every time you changed ANY value on ANY flight. It takes an average of 200 milliseconds per group. By default there’s 56 groups, that means you’d be looking at an 11 second pause every time you changed a value and tabbed to a new field.

Group totals are all updated every time you open the logbook so your currency numbers will be up to date.

(Updates at startup occur approximately one every second so that you can keep using LogTen Pro while they’re updating. This means your totals should all be accurate within about a minute.)

At some point I will develop a batching and multi-threading mechanism that will track the fact you made changes, queue them up, and then update the groups totals in the background when you’re idle.

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.