How to track your flight training progress

Why a logbook isn't enough

A logbook is a legal record: date, aircraft, route, times. Your school's system records the same, plus the lessons. Both answer "what did I fly?" The questions you have as a student are different: am I flying often enough, how much is left, and will I finish when I planned? Those need the same data, looked at another way.

1. Hours against your licence minimums

Every licence has minimums: for a Part-FCL PPL, 45 hours of instruction with 25 dual and 10 supervised solo, 5 of those solo cross-country, plus a qualifying cross-country. Total them by type (dual, solo, cross-country, night, instrument) and compare each against its minimum, not only the grand total. It's easy to be well over 45 hours and still short on solo cross-country. Every course's minimums are on the PPL, CPL, MPL and ATPL pages.

2. Syllabus progress

Hours say whether you'll meet the minimums; the syllabus says how much training is left. Tick off each lesson as you complete it and keep track of the stage you're in (pre-solo, solo consolidation, navigation, test preparation). When one stage takes much longer than the others, that's worth a conversation with your instructor.

3. Flight frequency

Flights per week is the number that decides how fast you progress and how much you remember between lessons. Work it out over whole weeks, counting the weeks you didn't fly, and look at your recent weeks as well as the whole course. See how to calculate your flight frequency.

4. Gaps

An average hides breaks. Keep an eye on the days since your last flight, and note your longest gaps and what caused them: weather, the aircraft, holidays, money. See how long between lessons is too long.

5. Your projected finish

Put it together: lessons left, divided by flights per week, plus the breaks you've planned, gives a finish date. Compare it with your target date and you know early whether you need to fly more, or move the target.

Tracking it in a spreadsheet

You can do all of this yourself. A sheet with one row per flight and columns for the date, aircraft, lesson, dual or solo, and block time gets you most of the way:

• Total each kind of time with SUMIF and compare it against your minimums.
• Count lessons done against the number in your syllabus.
• Add a column with the days since the previous flight for your gaps, then AVERAGE and MEDIAN it.
• Divide your flight count by the weeks since your first flight for your flights per week.

The catch is keeping it up to date, and counting cross-country and night time correctly from each flight.

Tracking it with PilotMetrics

PilotMetrics was built for exactly this. Import your logbook from FlightLogger (every logbook column comes across) or log flights by hand, pick your course and licence, and set a target date. Then:

• The Dashboard shows your totals, flights per week, average and median gap, days since your last flight and your training streak.
• Pace shows your flights per week, week by week, and your gaps grouped by length.
• Progress shows your syllabus, your hours against your course minimums and your projected finish from the Pace Planner.
• Pro checks every minimum in your logbook (solo cross-country, the qualifying cross-country, night and instrument time) and finds the stages that are holding you up.

You can also add your instructor, who then follows your training read-only on their free Instructor Dashboard.

Review it regularly

Tracking only helps if you look at it. A quick weekly check (did I fly, how long since my last flight?) and a monthly one (flights and hours this month, am I still on course for my target?) is enough to spot problems while they're still small.