AndreiC Posted January 9 Report Posted January 9 I have finally decided to enter the modern age (!!) and to start using an electronic logbook. Since I use Foreflight I will go with that for now. But I have two large old logbooks with handwritten entries going back 24 years that I'd like to add to the electronic record, and doing it by hand seems very tedious. Does anyone have a better way?
N201MKTurbo Posted January 9 Report Posted January 9 Make a new years commitment to enter 1 page per day. It will be fun. You will get to re-live all those flights. 1
MikeOH Posted January 9 Report Posted January 9 1 hour ago, N201MKTurbo said: It will be fun Yeah, right up there with watching snow melt and grass growing
Jerry 5TJ Posted January 9 Report Posted January 9 Group the early entries by N number and then make one FF log entry. Per my FF logbook I, for example, logged 877 hours in an E model on 1/1/99. The next day I logged 266 hours in a T210. It was a busy week. 1
McMooney Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 I just summed up all the entries and entered them into gp as one line.
takair Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 I’ve been too lazy to transition for this exact reason. I use FF track logs to update my paper log book manually every few months. You would think I would just go paperless. Anyway, I was going to suggest AI. So, I just ran a quick trial with Chat GPT. I suspect that a patient and motivated person could write a script for Chat GPT to do this. In my quick trial, with some prompting, I was able to get chat GPT to add up my individual aircraft hours by teaching it what the boxes meant. I suspect you can get pretty good results with a good overall prompt. I guess then you might scan your logbook into a PDF and use Chat to summarize? Although I guess that still doesn’t solve the problem of getting into Foreflight….so I think I’m talking myself out of it. That said, perhaps suggest that to Foreflight and see if they like it enough to add it as a feature?
midlifeflyer Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 You can treat a new eLog just like a new paper logbook. Give it starting totals - there are instructions how to do that - and just go from there. You can always catch up later if you want to. For catch up, you don’t even have to use the app. It will probably be easier to create a compatible spreadsheet (ForeFlight provides a template on the website) catch up there and, when done, delete the starting totals and import the spreadsheet.
Jackk Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 Just treat it like a normal log book forward totals use something like genus scan (apple App Store) to make your paper logs into a pdf and upload into your foreflight docs 1
N201MKTurbo Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 4 hours ago, Jerry 5TJ said: Group the early entries by N number and then make one FF log entry. Per my FF logbook I, for example, logged 877 hours in an E model on 1/1/99. The next day I logged 266 hours in a T210. It was a busy week. That’s cheating, you will regret it some day. 2
Jerry 5TJ Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 6 hours ago, N201MKTurbo said: That’s cheating, you will regret it some day. Well, I haven’t yet and it’s been 15 years.
midlifeflyer Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 7 hours ago, N201MKTurbo said: That’s cheating, you will regret it some day. I have all my flights individually logged electronically (my first eLog was in DOS in the mid-1990s), so I know the advantages. But why will someone who chose not to do that regret it?
N201MKTurbo Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 They will remember some memorable flight and go to look it up and there will be no record of it. But if you have the original books, you can still look it up. It is also handy to see if you have been to some airport or to see all the airports in some state you have been to. You will lose the ability to search for that stuff. There has been quite a few times here on Mooneyspace that somebody mentions an airport and I can search the database to see the last time I landed there. It is kind of nice to easily find that info. It would take a lot of effort to find that looking through a pile of books. 2
midlifeflyer Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 5 minutes ago, N201MKTurbo said: They will remember some memorable flight and go to look it up and there will be no record of it. But if you have the original books, you can still look it up. It is also handy to see if you have been to some airport or to see all the airports in some state you have been to. You will lose the ability to search for that stuff. There has been quite a few times here on Mooneyspace that somebody mentions an airport and I can search the database to see the last time I landed there. It is kind of nice to easily find that info. It would take a lot of effort to find that looking through a pile of books. Your first example “original books” sounds more like a plug for paper logs than electronic, although there’s nothing in my paper logs that isn’t in my eLog (except old signatures). I agree completely with your second example. I recently discovered that I had landed at an airport I’ve completely forgotten about. But that why I asked. Nice to have and handy don’t srike me the same as “will regret.”
wombat Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 Take pictures of each page of your logbook and put the task up on fivrr or you might try craigslist or facebook marketplace. Pay the cash cost of 5 minutes of flight time for each page converted to a spreadsheet.
Max Clark Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 I paid a service per page for this. Photos of each page of my logbook, they returned a csv file with the entries ready for import into FF. Wasn't expensive and well worth it.
midlifeflyer Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 18 hours ago, takair said: Anyway, I was going to suggest AI. So, I just ran a quick trial with Chat GPT. My curiosity was peaked so I couldn't resist doing that also. I pulled out a page at random and gave it a try. Three tries actually as I corrected ChatGPT. It's still not perfect. For example, dual given is not recorded as such. OTOH, I would not expect such things as HP or Complex to be included since those are lookup based on aircraft type in the eLog database. But it is quite impressive. If anyone wants to see it, I have printed the entire ChatGPT experience to a pdf and placed it here. I don't doubt companies who are doing this are using AI to get to a certain point and then manually fixing what is needed. 1
MikeOH Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 11 hours ago, Max Clark said: I paid a service per page for this. Photos of each page of my logbook, they returned a csv file with the entries ready for import into FF. Wasn't expensive and well worth it. What, if any, error checking did you perform? If you did, were any errors found? Also, whom did you use?
PeteMc Posted January 10 Report Posted January 10 (edited) I'll toss my suggestion into the pot. 1) Start using the FF Logbook. Pending how many flght you did last year... either manually start with 01/01/25 or if you had a lot of flights, just start with 01/01/26. (Only reason to start with 2025 is for FF to show the correct Currency.) 2) Download the sample_logbook_template.csv from the FF Website. And just start entering the Aircraft and Flights out of your paper logbook. 3) Once you're caught up to where the FF Logbook starts, EXPORT your Logbook which will be another .CSV file. Copy the flights from that Export into the .CSV file that has all of your other flights which will give you a complet logbook file. You can confirm with FF Support, but you can then just Import that file and replace everything that is currently in you FF Logbook. So basically you've got everythig now in FF. Notes on the .CSV template.... DO NOT delete or change any of the Headers (Titles)!! Do not Delete any of the Columns!! You can, obvioulsy, delete all of the Sample/Example Aircraft (top section) or Flights (lower section) to put in your data. Also, FF uses KABC, so be sure to add the K to the Airports that way if you just have ABC in your paper logbook. Also, if you have multiple flights in one day, FF may not show them in the correct order once imported into FF. I add a 0100, 0200, etc. in Time Out column for the 1st, 2nd, etc., fight for that day to put them back into the correct order. Edited January 11 by PeteMc 1
Max Clark Posted January 12 Report Posted January 12 On 1/10/2026 at 2:17 PM, MikeOH said: What, if any, error checking did you perform? If you did, were any errors found? Also, whom did you use? I confirmed totals in the CSV matched what I had from my logbooks I confirmed that at random dates the numbers matched I spot checked random entries on different pages It was easier to line up than I would have expected I used http://www.convertmylogbook.com/ but the page isn't loading 1
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