You hear that “such-and-such a captain has 17,000 flying hours, an F/O has 8,000 hours, etc.” Do airline pilots keep a logbook that they update all the time and that is also audited by the airline to ensure no cheating or fabrication?
The airline tracks it for them.
Yes. It’s an FAA requirement to maintain the pilot’s license.
It’s not quite as black & white as the above answers would indicate.
Airlines track 100% of a pilot’s work for them to ensure compliance with all the regulations about maximum work per day, week, month & year. Those records know nothing of a pilot’s flying for fun on the weekend, nor any military flying he/she might be doing. Typically the employment agreement specifies that airline pilots may not engage in other flying for hire precisely because that work would impinge on the airline’s ability to accurately track the pilots’ work vis-à-vis regulatory compliance, and would also limit the airline’s ability to use their employees to the legal max.
These company records also include all training and evaluations to ensure that all the regulatory requirements for periodic training and experience are met. And these records are also ignorant of any non-work flying training or non-work evaluations the pilot may get on his/her own time.
As a separate matter, many pilots keep a logbook of all their time. This can be a pen-and-ink record in a special-purpose ledger book (e.g. Pilot’s Flight Logbook and Record), or some homebrew spreadsheet, or there are PC & tablet apps for this purpose.
There is absolutely zero regulatory requirement to keep a logbook. Despite andrewm’s comments. What there IS is a requirement to be able to document by detailed contemporaneous record that you have accomplished the required experience for an improved license.
So for example a student pilot must keep a logbook to document his/her experience towards achieving a private pilot’s license. But having gotten that license, and not desiring to progress into professional piloting, that pilot has zero requirement to log any further flying. A great many airline pilots, having achieved the topmost gradation of license, completely stop logging their time in any personal record of any kind.
Logs may required for a second purpose. For non-airline people there are recency of experience requirements for some specific types of flights, and for everyone a requirement for refresher training every 2 years. If you’re going to fly those specific types of flights, you need to log at least enough relevant flights to meet the recency requirements. But you need log no more than that. So one could, if one wanted, log only the bare minimum flights to meet requirements and never write down the rest.
As well, if one had no interest in those specific ops, one could log only their 2-year refresher training flights and no other flying whatsoever.
As a practical matter, most pilots log everything. It’s sort of a diary. At the end of a career, or just a lifelong hobby, there’s not too much else to show for it. All the wakes you’ve drug across the sky are long-since dissipated.
And certainly while any professional pilot is working his/her way up the job ladder in the industry everything is logged because every moment of experience is precious towards that next better job. When you leave a job your employer is supposed to provide you with a certified copy of their records of your work for them, both good and bad. That’s all well and good when you’re leaving a quality operator. But if you’re banging around the bilges of the aviation world wanting to move up to at least the engine room, best to have kept your own records. Which will be reviewed in depth at every interview for the rest of your career.
The poor little plan pilots have to keep their own, or are supposed to.
I entered the log at the end of every flying day unless I was flying longer than 24 hours duty time.
Longest duty time was 36 hours with a bit over 26 flight hours, 4 film changes, 6 fuel stops, 3+ hours in Flight Service Stations weather rooms. 835 miles of photos at 60% overlap.
All times to the nearest 1/10th of an hour. I was always more aware of where my logbook was than my billfold.
Airline pilots only get actual time off the ground so I might log my time from starting the takeoff run but for the poor airline pilot, that is not considered flight time so they work a lot more for the hours they get to log. Also, airline pilots spend a lot more time on a taxiway than and small plane pilot will over the course of a year.
Space Shuttle pilots cheat. ::: grump ::::
LSL Guy ninjad me and has way better big iron knowledge so disregard all I said about what airline pilots need or get to do.
FYI, for us time is logged from pushback to parking, same as for 135 & 91 ops. “Flight time” is defined in FAR 91.
Under military regs, time is logged from takeoff to touchdown. Or at least that was true when I was doing it. My military experience is getting stale enough that I feel the need to include that [back in the Dayes of Yore] caveat more and more. The USAF also had very different ideas of dual, solo, PIC, SIC, etc.
But most of us who had any inkling we might want to fly civilian afterwards kept a paper logbook while in the service wherein we logged our flight time per FAA standards, both total quantity and breakdowns. Airlines were used to that issue and the typical application asked whether you were quoting your military time as takeoff-to-landing or taxi-to-park.
Canadian rules -
http://www.copanational.org/EntriesInLogbooks.cfm
So since 1996 logging personal flight time has been mandatory. In addition, all flight time by an aircraft must be logged. I had assumed the same applied in the USA, but in aircraft procedures not involving shoes or strip searches, the USA tends to be a bit more lax.
CASA (Australian authority) requires us to log everything.
I stopped updating my paper log book several years ago and now only keep an electronic version. I normally update it once a month but sometimes leave it longer. Back when I was chasing hours for something I would log after every flight, but now I don’t really care anymore.
After each duty in a particularly aircraft I take a photo of the aircraft trip log so when it comes time to update my pilot’s log I just copy over the info from the trip log. (This has also saved me from the safety audit guys when they ring me up accusing me of doing something outrageous and I’ve been able to show that none of the flight data matches my saved trip log photo and therefore they have the wrong flight.)
CASA actually require a physical logbook to be kept so I periodically print out the most recent pages and put them in a binder. I have grand plans of getting it all professionally printed and bound in several books but that would require proof reading the whole thing, and I never get around to it.
Can personal or military flying impinge on your readiness (per the regs) for flying for the airline? IOW, if you spend the afternoon in your Cessna, or flying for the ANG, can that put you over your allowed flying time for the day/week/whatever, and make it illegal for you to fly a trans-Atlantic flight that night?
Strictly “no”; practically “maybe”.
The regs covering airline flying limits explicitly include only that flying, with carve-outs for other kinds. So in that sense, no.
But before each airline flight we’re now required to certify, on pain of career destruction, that we are mentally and physically 100% ready and able to perform flawlessly. Including how sleepy we are, or expect to be at arrival time.
So a big day doing yard work or flying light planes should be a disqualification for an all-nighter to Europe.
This is a fairly recent change and the full ramifications on work culture, as well as FAA attitude to fudging, is still evolving.