I just received an email from Scott, asking about what to do when you lose your logbook:

In previous years I have accumulated approx. 30 to 35 hours in student training in the air, either with my instructors or by myself, Unfortunately I have lost my log book. What should I do ? Both of my instructors are still in my area, can they help?

Hi Scott.  Sorry to hear about your logbook, that stinks.  As a pilot, I have two recurring nightmares.  The first one is where I totally forget about a scheduled flight until about an hour after it is supposed to leave and the second nightmare is losing my logbook. You are in a great position in that you have less than 40 hours accumulated so it won’t be nearly the chore it could have been, if say you had like 4,000 hours.

Jeppesen Professional Logbook

There are several ways to copy your logbook once it has been lost or destroyed by using other paper records of the flights, no matter what stage you are in your flying career.

1) Your flight Instructors. Your flight instructors will have their own personal logbook that has records of the flights that you flew with them.  You could ask your flight instructors for copies of the pages where you flew together.  You could easily use that in a new logbook.

2) Your flight school. The flight school should have both financial records and aircraft records of the flights that you lost.  You should contact the flight school and ask for a copy of the aircraft hobbs records.  Usually the hobbs will record the name of the instructor and student so it should be pretty simple to track down these records if you have a general idea of when you flew.

3) Canceled Checks.  I remember one of my flight students would jot down the flight time and aircraft registration number in the notes portion of his check.  If something would have happened to his records,  it would have been a simple matter of flipping through some old checks to duplicate his logbook.

4) FAA Form 8710. When you go to take your checkride you will fill out a form 8710 which is basically your airman application form.  Near the bottom of the form you will fill in a table that documents your flight hours and experience.  You can easily duplicate a logbook from this information.  In fact, that is one of the purposes of that form.

5) Company Records. If you are a professional pilot you can use company records to help duplicate your logbook.  I often make records of the company forms I use in the aircraft and keep them handy in the event something would happen to my logbook.

6) Electronic Backup. There are many options when it comes to logbook software and online pilot logbooks. One of the best electronic logbook programs is Logbook Pro by NC Software. One of the nice things about Logbook Pro is being able to export to many different formats for both printing and storing.

Good luck Scott with your logbook. I hope that you continue your training and that you find a solution to help prevent this in the future.  Be sure to…

Fly Safe.

Received a question tonight from a northern aviator:

In Canada we have the Designated Airspace Handbook. It’s the legal document that defines Canada’s airspace.  Does the FAA have something similar?

Hi Blake.  I took a look at the link you sent me for the Canadian Designated Airspace Handbook and to answer your question, the U.S. federal government does not produce a similar file.  However, if it is any comfort…it used to! The file and data used to be called the Digital Aeronautical Flight Information File or DAFIF.   DAFIF is managed by the NGA or National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.  The DAFIF data was publicly available until October of 2006 when it was pulled because of “national security” (actually it’s a much longer and boring story).  DAFIF data is still available but you have to have a really good reason for accessing it (like you work for the NGA) So for plain old folks like you and me nope, sorry Blake.

However…

Thanks to the internet and people willing to share this information you can still find some outdated DAFIF files out there if you are wanting them for mapping and such.  The Worldwide Soring Turnpoint Exchange has one of the best collection of links for outdated DAFIF data. If you are U.S. you can also request access to the National Flight Data Center and get access to the FAADS, but I think you might have to be a U.S. citizen (although don’t quote me on that).  One of my favorite tools for viewing the U.S. airspace in 3d is this kmz Google Earth file.  You can download Google Earth to view this file.  You can also download U.S. sectional kml file to get a complete picture like the screenshot I made for you below.   Wow, I’ve been typing for like a hour and I don’t even know if I answered your question or not….

If you have followed this site for any length of time, you’ll probably recall how Ask a CFI used to be forum based.  In fact, it has had a forum feature on / off since 2001 when I registered this domain.  I have tried out a couple different types of forum software in the last few years.  The first one was Dcscript’s DCforum.  I then switched to the more popular Vbulletin forum script.  One of the needs I recognized was that the vbulletin “theme” would have to be customized for the aviation community so I drafted a rough sketch and paid a vbulletin designer to tweak and customize the style.   Ask a CFI.com is no longer utilizing the forum feature and I thought it wasteful to let a good theme sit idle.  So I am now giving away a FREE Aviation vbulletin style to those who might be interested.

A couple of rules / notes.

1) This file is AS IS. I am not providing ANY support for this theme.  Why? Because I have a lot of projects going on and I am not a VB expert AT ALL.

2) The lastest version of vbulletin used with this theme was 3.6.9.  I have no clue if it is comptabile with anything before or after.  (see note 1)

3) I ask that you please leave a link to my site in the footer.

So as long as you agree to these 3 rules, here is the file for you:

Download: vb aviation style.zip

Instructions: Extract this zipped folder to your local drive and then upload the images folder to your vbulletin directory. Go to style manager in your vbulletin administration and upload / download styles. Browse to aviation-style.xml and you should be good to go! Good luck.