Properties In-Depth: Part 3 - Odds and ends, tips and tricks

In the previous two posts, I have described how properties work at a high level and some groups of properties that have some sort of meaning to MyFlightbook.

In this final post on the topic, I want to discuss "odds and ends" - properties that have meaning to the system or otherwise have specific functionality, but which do not fall into any of the larger buckets previously described.

Instructors and Students

Students can give instructors permission to add flights to their logbook.  If so, then there is an additional template that is automatically applied for the instructor.  This includes two properties that the instructor is likely to want to include in the student's record: Ground Instruction Received and Name of Instructor.

When signing a flight, the instructor has the option to copy the flight being signed into their own logbook.  Naturally, this is an asymmetric relationship, so the act of copying the flight reflects this asymmetry.  During the copy, the following transformations are performed:

• Dual time is copied to CFI time and PIC time and is then cleared.
  
• If a flight review is indicated in the student's record, it is not copied to the instructor's record but a Flight Review Given property is added.
• Ground Instruction Received is deleted and it's value is re-used in Ground Instruction Given
• The Student's name is copied to the Name of Student property.
  

The flight checker also looks for a missing instructor name for flights that have dual indicated but are not signed.  (Since a signature includes the name of the instructor, having an explicit property for instructor name is unnecessary).

Finally, if you are doing autofill and the entry has a defined lesson start/end period (from Lesson Start to Lesson End) and you have Dual or CFI time indicated in your flight, then the excess of lesson time minus flight is added to Ground Instruction Received (if you're a student - i.e., you logged Dual time) or to Ground Instruction Given (if you are the instructor - i.e., you logged CFI time).

Paired Times and Values

There are a variety of "paired" properties that indicate a start/stop.  On the main flight form is hobbs time, which the system knows about intrinsically (and because it's based on clock time, the system can perform computations using hobbs start/end).  

 

But there are others, and the system knows about these as well:

• Tachometer Start/Tachometer End.  A useful tip here is that the starting tach value can often be auto-filled by clicking the cross-fill arrow (website) or by pressing-and-holding (mobile apps).  This cross-fill looks across your flights in the flight's selected aircraft and finds the highest value; this is then used to initialize the starting tach value.
• Block Out/Block In - Technically this defines the time you can log for a flight, though many people use hobbs time as an approximation.  Block Time can be used as a source for auto-filling total time (on the mobile apps) or for auto-fill; and as a sort criteria if present and needed; as a substitute for departure/arrival time (if not otherwise specified), and in part 117 currency computations.
• Lesson Start / End - As described above, these denote the start and end of a lesson so that ground instruction time can be estimated.
  

As mentioned in my prior post, all of these pairs have an obvious semantic requirement that the start value must be before the ending value; the Flight Checker looks for most of these. 

Other tips and tricks

• You can set up auto-fill options for a given aircraft to automatically copy your name to the Name of PIC property for any flight in that aircraft. 
• If you go to the Visited Airports page and add "df=1" to the URL, then clicking "Estimate Distance" will fill in the Distance Flown property for each flight (if not already present), using either attached telemetry or great-circle distance for the route.  Use with care!
• If you use any anonymous aircraft, then the Aircraft Registration property will automatically be available.  You can put the tail number of the aircraft you're flying on that flight into that property if you like.
• The Additional Flight Remarks property allows you to record additional short comments for a flight; these are automatically suppressed from print layouts.