Ownership: Paper or electrons?

Q&A with Eric Berman

The creator of MyFlightbook.com weighs in on electronic logbooks.

Should the logbook be in the cloud or on a local desktop or laptop?
“When I started my logbook 10 years ago, there was no cloud-based logbook and that seemed very silly to me. When it’s in the cloud you have access to it anywhere. Hard disks crash, laptops get lost. There are all sorts of problems with local storage. Cloud also has the advantage of making bug fixes and enhancements without having to push any updates to the pilots. It is easier to use with a mobile device, since you don’t have to sync from here to there and resolve conflicts with data in two places.”

Should it be a dedicated logbook program or can it be one part of a broader app?
“This one I don’t feel nearly as strongly about. There are certainly pros and cons. I focus on a standalone program because I focus on what I think I can do well. ForeFlight and Garmin take the opposite approach, where a logbook is sort of a natural complement to what they do. The tradeoff there is you get a lot of benefit from the integration, I can’t deny that, but it does become more of an all-or-nothing choice.”

Is there something I can do to secure my information that is not already being done?
“You shouldn’t have to do anything. Your information should be secure. Anybody who is not securing your information is by default not doing a good job. All your data should be password protected or otherwise require you to authenticate yourself to access it. Anything that is on a server up in the cloud needs to have database best practices around it.”

What’s the status of transferring information among electronic logbooks? Is that simple? Not simple?
“It’s somewhere in between. There’s no standardized interchange format or anything like that, but there are commonalities. Personally I take a philosophy that it should be easy to get in and should be just as easy to get out. It is your data. Other providers are at various places on that spectrum. There are subtle differences. In my logbook there is no such thing as logging multiengine time or logging high-performance time. That was a very explicit design decision I made, because all of that can best be inferred and computed based on the aircraft used in the flight. If you log an hour and a half of Boeing 737 time then you’ve logged an hour and a half of turbine time, multiengine time, retract [retractable gear] time.” (Berman’s program recognizes aircraft type, but some do not.)

How does the FAA react to your program and other programs when the FAA needs proof that you are ready for an ATP rating or wants to review your logbook or see an electronic signature?
“I have three answers for you. The first is [to ask], is an electronic logbook accepted? The FAA has been explicitly cagey on that. They do not certify logbooks. They say it’s fine as long as it is in a manner acceptable to the administrator. I’ve never been challenged on it. I do have pilots who print out because paper is a known quantity. As far as the acceptability of using an electronic logbook, I have yet to hear of the FAA pushing back on that to me or to anybody else. That doesn’t mean they haven’t or won’t or don’t, but just not to me. There is an advisory circular, AC 120-78, that talks about what is necessary for an electronic signature to be valid for purposes of signing flights or giving endorsements—things like that. Again, the FAA is a little bit cagey in that they say, ‘Here are the standards you have to meet,’ but if you ask, ‘Will you certify that I meet those standards,’ the answer is ‘no.’ I went through the criteria you have to meet and I’ve self-certified. All anybody can say is, ‘Yeah, we think we are in compliance.’ The third piece is, if there is an accident or some kind of a case, I imagine that the FAA could subpoena a pilot’s records. I’ve never had the FAA ask me for anybody’s records.”