A pilot's logbook is, on its surface, a regulatory requirement. It is proof of hours. Evidence of qualifications. A document that moves with you from training to private licence to commercial to airline, accumulating the numerical record of a career.
But anyone who has kept one for long enough knows it becomes something else entirely.
This guide covers both: the entries you need to make, and the ones worth making even when nobody is asking you to.
The regulatory baseline: what must be recorded
Requirements vary by country and regulating authority — CASA in Australia, the FAA in the United States, EASA across Europe. The specifics differ, but the core categories are consistent across most frameworks:
Date — the date of each flight, not the date of entry. If you're logging retrospectively (common in training), be precise.
Departure and arrival aerodrome — use ICAO codes where possible. They travel better across international records.
Aircraft registration and type — both the specific registration (the tail number) and the aircraft type (C172, B737, A320, etc.). Type endorsements matter for future employment and currency purposes.
Total time of flight — block time, from chocks off to chocks on, recorded in decimal hours or hours and minutes depending on your authority's preference. Be consistent throughout your log.
Pilot function — the role you flew: Pilot in Command (PIC), Co-Pilot (or Second in Command/SIC), Pilot Under Instruction (PUI), or Safety Pilot. This matters more than people realise — PIC time and co-pilot time are weighted differently for most ratings and type endorsements.
Instrument flight time — actual IMC (Instrument Meteorological Conditions) and simulated instrument time logged separately, with simulated time typically requiring a safety pilot notation.
Night flight time — usually defined as the period from the end of evening civil twilight to the beginning of morning civil twilight. Know your authority's exact definition.
Landings — day and night, recorded separately. These accumulate toward currency requirements and are scrutinised by airlines at interview.
The columns most pilots underuse
Cross-country time — logged differently by different authorities (CASA defines it as any flight to an aerodrome more than 25nm from the departure point; the FAA requires a landing at a point other than the departure aerodrome). Know your definition and log it correctly from the beginning.
Simulator or synthetic training device time, most modern logbooks include this. Keep it. It's relevant for type ratings and for some currency requirements.
Dual received / dual given, if you are a flight instructor, logging time given is essential. If you are in training, dual received builds the evidentiary record of your instruction.
Remarks and endorsements, the column that separates a functional log from a valuable one. More on this below.
What to write in the remarks column
This is where most pilots log nothing, or "standard ops," or a brief ATC callsign. This is a missed opportunity.
The remarks column is the place for:
The firsts. Your first solo. Your first instrument approach in actual IMC. Your first night landing. Your first entry into controlled airspace. These moments are worth marking explicitly — not because anyone requires it, but because you will want to find them later.
Significant conditions. Turbulence, diversions, unusual weather, go-arounds. The situations that made you a better pilot deserve a sentence, not a blank.
New destinations. The first time you flew into a destination, the ICAO code, the runway, anything that made the approach or the airport memorable. If you're flying professionally, these accumulate into a record of the world you've covered.
Personal notes. The logbook is a professional document, but it is also a private one. A one-line note about who you flew with, a passenger who mattered, a view from the flight deck at dawn over a coast you'd never seen before — these cost nothing to record and become invaluable with time.
The logbook as a career document
When you present your logbook at an airline assessment or a type rating interview, it tells a story before you say a word. A well-maintained log with accurate totals, consistent format, entries that reflect professional awareness, this demonstrates the kind of pilot you are.
Hours alone don't tell that story. The quality and care of the log tells the rest.
Keep it current. Don't let a backlog develop beyond a week. Totals entered in a rush are totals that get wrong and incorrect hour counts in a log presented at interview are a significant credibility problem.
Choosing the right logbook
If you're still flying with whatever log your training school gave you — or an airline-issue document that feels like a tax form — it might be time to reconsider.
A career's worth of flying deserves a logbook that reflects what that career means. The Navigators Flight Log Book ($39.95 AUD) was designed for exactly this: a log worthy of being kept, referred back to, and eventually passed on.
Hand-finished, beautifully bound, and available in Royal Blue, Sangria, and Jungle Green — with complimentary monogramming on every order. Your initials or name on the cover makes it unambiguously yours from the first entry.
The interior is structured for complete professional logging: all the required fields, the remarks space, and the cumulative totals that matter. But it is built to feel like an object worth owning, not a form to be completed.
On starting again (the logbook you carry forward)
Some pilots keep one logbook for their entire career. Others move between logs as they move between stages of aviation — training, private, commercial, airline. There is no single correct approach.
What matters is that each logbook is complete when it closes: totals brought forward accurately, dates intact, the progression of a career readable from the first page to the last.
If you are starting a new logbook — a new stage, a new licence, a new chapter — begin it with the same care you intend to carry through the rest of it. The first entry sets the standard for all the ones that follow.
The log as legacy
There is a version of a pilot's logbook that is nothing but a compliance document — columns filled, totals correct, filed in a drawer and produced only when required.
And there is another version: the one that sits on a desk, that gets opened occasionally not to update it but to read it. The one that holds the record of a first solo, a route crossed for the first time, a milestone reached after years of building toward it.
Both are technically the same object. Only one of them is worth keeping.
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