Everyone, its Matt Williams, mr. MPW, welcome back to the channel in today’s. Drone expert secrets, video. We’re, going to take a look at flight logs. What you need to do and how you need to keep them so in today’s.

Video! We’re, going to take a look at flight logs. It’s, a question that we get asked all the time, as are most of these questions, that’s. Why we’re producing this content if it is useful – and you do find the content in here useful, please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel press the bell button next to the subscribe button.

So you stay up to date with all of the new and forthcoming hints and tips that we’ve got as we go along so flight log in it’s, something which I think nowadays a lot of people take for granted. We just kind of assumed that, with the majority of the aircraft that we use, particularly if you’re using a DJI aircraft that the flight logs and every fire that we do are going to be logged for us and that kind of is the Case, I guess you know in the DJI app in particular.

If that’s, what you’re using then every single time. You start the motors, get the aircraft airborne and stop the motors that will be logged, and you can generally see quite a lot of information about each flight.

The problem comes, and the main reason that we don’t use the built-in flight logging on DJI aircraft ourselves within our business. When something happens to that information – and I don’t know if I’m honest where that informations held, I don’t know which cloud system it’s in I don’t know how Or kind of whether it’s encrypted or secure, I don’t know and what we’ve seen in the past is a couple of different things happen back in the day when the different kind of iterations of the Dji app were being pushed out to people.

We saw sometimes that all of our information had disappeared. Then we saw all the information was doubled and then it went again and then it came back and it was like what is going on. So we were really glad that from the very beginning we’d, always kept our own flight logs.

Now there is no excuse. I wouldn’t suggest as a commercial operator for you to not be noting down the flight time. Every time you go flying it’s, actually something that the CAA can and will check. If you’re audited, and it is something that we’re meant to log, we’ve, moved away from doing battery logs all the time now and we’ll.

Do a separate video about that and Yuja because, primarily when we’re using the newer aircraft, we’re using smart batteries and they tend to do the logging themselves. But again it’s. More than worth keeping a note of the battery number that you’ve used against each flight.

Just so you ‘ Ve got that information. So what I’m going to do is dive on in, and I will show you at the computer, the flight log kind of spreadsheet that we have. I’ll, walk you through how it all works, and then I will leave it as a downloadable link so that you can have access to it.

It’s. What we use day in day out, to keep track of all our flight logs, just worth noting, I suppose as well. There are a couple of other applications which are out there, one in particular the UAV data service, which can synchronize with your DJI account through the API, and, if you have certain versions of it, will allow you to download your flight logs.

Now. Those are awesome and those if you save them, can be printed out and then sent off to the CIA. There are a couple of things that you need to make sure you’ve got inside your flight log, so when you do submit them to the CIA, they need to show the pilots name, they need to show the date and they need to show The year, the other thing that they do like to have on there when you upload them as part of your renewal process, is the signature.

So your signature or the accountable managers signature on each one. Two things to note: just before we do dive on in and take a look you have to have when you’re doing renewal, you have to have a minimum of two hours flight time logged in the previous three months.

So, every three months you need to be doing at least two hours of flying in order to stay current and competent. If you’re about to go on a job today, and you’ve only done an hour in the previous three months, you need to go out and do an hour of flying before you can go into the commercial job.

That is the only way you can be classed as current and competent to have two hours in the preceding three months. So make sure that you have that make sure that you get that noted down the other thing to look at.

I suppose, when you are gonna submit these is making sure that your logs are outputted as a PDF, as I say, ideally with a signature on, so the CIA can see them as part of your application process once so.

This is the flight log template that we use and it maybe looks a little bit more complicated than a lot. What’s? A lot of people who used to, but this covers everything that the CIA need in order for you to have your flight logs just pass straight through and actually what we’ve done, has made it really really simple.

This is taken from if I’m – honest military flying log book initially that’s where the layout comes from, but it works really really well, as you can see what we’ve got down here, we’Ve broken everything down into the months and you can click through the months.

You can add extra rows in if you need to, but at the moment. Actually what we find is that, generally, those are enough rows for each month that we found going through so far. So the way this works is that we would come to this page, first of all, to set everything up and doesn’t matter.

If you start in in say July, as the month is now, and what we would do along the bottom, we would fill in these totals here so say: we’ve got two columns, we’ve got multi-rotor and we’Ve got fixed-wing, we’ve got day and night, because those are the things that we track and we’ve got the option to use multi, rotor and fixed-wing aircraft on our PFC.

Oh, it may be that you only have multi rotor or you only have fixed-wing it. Doesn’t matter. Just ignore any columns that you don’t use. So in here say we’ve got 50 hours and 35 minutes of day flying and we’ve got four hours and 15 of night flying in multi, rotor, ok, no, we enter! That is that we would go for and then a colon and then 15 ok, and that is it.

And then, if we look forwards into all of the other months, it’s actually carried that across for us. So total is 50 minutes 35 day. Multi rotor and 4 hours, 15 night multi rotor. So let’s go forward to July, as it is today.

I’ll, put a flight in for the 8th, so I’m gonna go 8 in there and let’s say we’ve, just flown our Mavic to pro, and if you do have a serial Number on your drone, or not necessarily a serial number. If you’ve got an aircraft number.

All of our drones have an aircraft number associated with them. In our case, it’s generally, something like UAV, zero, zero, eight or something like that. This is something that we’ve, actually left in in this version of the sheet for people to download.

Because when mandatory registration comes in for the UK, you will have to put some form of identification sticker on your aircraft or your aircraft will be identifiable in some way, and you can pop that number in there, which we hope is really useful.

Then we pop in the battery number we do do tend to put a number on every single one of our batteries and we cycle through so that we use battery one two three and four. And then, when we come back to fly another day, we’d, use four three, two one just so that our batteries do you get cycles, so we ‘

Ll say this was battery number one I was, and in here it says captain or first pilot really. That means the remote pilot, the pilot in command. Now so that will be in here, I could put itself or you could put your surname if you were working with somebody else.

So in this case it says copilot, but actually I guess it would be camera operator or payload operator. In this case, there was no one with us and we can just put something like general, spelling and petroleum public.

Never good general handling practice. We’ve been out and we’ve flown and we’ve done 20 minutes. So again, zero and then 20 in there and as you can see what’s happened down at the bottom. Is our monthly totals gone to 20 minutes? A monthly rotor multi rotor totals gone to 20 minutes and it’s.

Actually added 20 minutes into our multi rotor total. So then say we did another battery and we flew 15 minutes on that one. You see that added in another battery 30 minutes, for example. So you can see it adds everything in as we go and then it makes it much more simple to work out how many hours flying you’ve done in the last three months.

You know we just look at effectively the multi, the monthly totals and add those up for the last three months and make sure that we ‘ Ve got enough flying in there to get our two hours in the rolling three months before any commercial flight, or before we submit our flight logs to the CIA.

If you ever want to come back in, then it’s just a case of amending. In the following year, save the sheet, then the following year take the totals from what would be December, or I suppose, whenever your end of year would be so in this case 51 40 and for 15 pop those into here 51:40 15.

And those now will roll across and it will base its calculations on those so hopefully fairly straightforward. Unfortunately, not gonna be able to provide any kind of individual and direct support on this sheet.

You know download it if you’ve got Excel. That should work, for you have a play around with it. If not, then you’ll, be able to use that as a template and to build your own, so it may seem a little bit over the top, but it contains all the information at the CAA need and it’ll make you Look good at an audit, but if you do need to print these out, all you do is select the area file print the print the selection, and then you ‘

Ve got a nice monthly log book that you can print out and then get a signature on from the accountable manager. I hope that was useful. Like I say, you know it’s really important to make sure that you keep accurate flight logs.

Make sure that you ‘ Ve got two hours in the three months preceding your renewal and make sure that they are printed out or PDF tout so that the CIA can see them easily. If you did like the video, please don’t forget to give us a thumbs up.

If you didn’t like it press that thumbs down button twice, if you’ve got any questions or anything else that you want to see. Please leave the questions in the comments in the comments box below and we’d love to see those, and we’d love to get the feedback from you as to what works.

What doesn’t, particularly when people get irate about me waving my arms around all the time I’ve been Matt Williams fly safe and blue skies.