What's with these "flight properties"?

All pilots keep logbooks, but the sorts of things that they want to log vary greatly from pilot to pilot.  If you were to draw this as a very simplified Venn diagram for the logbook requirements for only three such groups, it might look like this:

Of course, there are many more groups than these three, and there are subgroups within them.  Instrument rated pilots log stuff that VFR-only pilots do not; helicopter pilots have their maneuvers to record, and seaplane pilots have others; students working towards a rating have yet other experiences to record.

See that small piece where all three overlap?  These are the "Core" fields that all pilots might need to record on any given flight.  These include the familiar fields like Night, IMC, Dual, PIC, and Total time.  These are attributes that apply to pretty much any flight by pretty much any pilot.  This is why they are on the main flight form for MyFlightbook.

The set of things that somebody might want to record outside of those core fields currently (as of March 2018) numbers about 600, from Aerobatic Time to Zero-visibility Takeoffs.  This is a huge set of potential fields, and as the diagram above illustrates, any given pilot will typically use only a small subset of them.

For this reason, I've designed flight entries on MyFlightbook to have the concept of "properties" that you can attach to a flight.  Yeah, I suppose the terminology is a bit geeky (it does come from computer science), but it's "property" as in "attribute," as in "a property of this flight is that it included Aerobatic time."  Think of them as ornaments that you can attach to a flight.

The benefit to this architecture is that it allows your flights to efficiently use the subset of properties that match your flying, without cluttering things up (either on the screen or in the database) with things you'll never need. 

Specifically:

• All previously-used properties are available to you, either on the new flight form (website) or at the top of the list of properties (mobile apps).
• On the mobile apps, you can press-and-hold a property to make it stick to the new flight screen for quick access.  (Press and hold again to remove it).  On the website, where the assumption of more real estate means they can be displayed there automatically, you can control whether or not they show up on the Preferences screen.
• When you download a backup of your flights, a column is provided for each of the core fields, and also for each of the properties that you have ever used, but no column is provided for properties that you have never used.

Another advantage of the property architecture is that I can add new ones whenever I like, and doing so doesn't require a database or code change. 

People often ask me for new properties specific to their flying.  Sometimes the request is for something that could be just as easily handled with a note in the comments.  But other times, a new property is in order.

Here is the rough criteria I apply on deciding whether (or how) to honor the request for a new property:

• Is this something needs to accumulate in totals (e.g., time in a particular capacity, such as being a safety pilot)?
• Does this have semantics for currency or progress towards a rating?  Examples might include a checkride (resets the flight review requirement), or unusual attitude recoveries (which are necessary for instrument currency in an ATD).
• Do you need to be able to search for this deterministically?  E.g., you could easily record your charity flying by simply putting "Charity" in the comments for the flight; you could then get your charity totals by searching for "Charity".  But this could yield false positives (e.g., if you have a flight with the comment “flew to my friend’s charity event”) or false negatives (e.g., if you misspelled "charty flight" in the comments).
• What is the way to add this with the broadest applicability?  E.g., I myself fly for Angel Flight, but I don’t have an “Angel Flight” property – too many possible charities!  Instead, I have a “Charity Flight” property and just put “Angel Flight” in the comments.
• What are the right semantics for the property?  E.g., "Unusual Attitude Recoveries" could be a count ("I did 4 unusual attitude recoveries on this flight"), a time ("I spent 0.7 hours performing unusual attitude recoveries"), or a true/false ("This flight included unusual attitude recoveries").