You Already Logged the Flight: Importing from ForeFlight, SkyDemon and Garmin Pilot

There is a particular kind of pointless work that every shared aircraft creates. You land, you tie down, and then you sit in the clubhouse with your phone open in one hand and a form open in the other, copying numbers from an app that already knows them.

Block out 09:14. Takeoff 09:21. Landing 10:47. Block in 10:53. LEBL to LFMN.

Your EFB recorded all of it, to the second, while you were busy flying. Typing it again is not record keeping. It is transcription.

Export the track, keep the numbers

Kai reads the track file your electronic flight bag already produces. SkyDemon and ForeFlight export .kml. Garmin Pilot and ForeFlight export .gpx. Both formats work, and as of this week Garmin Pilot users are covered too.

The flow is three steps, and one of them is the flight:

1. Fly. Your EFB is already recording. Nothing extra to switch on.
2. Export the track. From your logbook in the app, share the file. On iPhone and iPad you can send it straight to Kai from the share sheet, because Kai registers as a destination for .kml and .gpx.
3. Confirm and save. Kai reads the track and opens a usage log with the times and airports already filled in.

What it works out from a line on a map

A GPS track is a list of positions with timestamps attached. That turns out to be enough for most of the tedious half of a usage log.

Block times come from the first and last point in the track. That is when the aircraft started moving and when it stopped, to the second.

Flight times are separated from block times using altitude. Kai looks for the first and last point more than 15 metres above the departure field's elevation. Everything before the first and after the last is taxi, so a long hold at a busy field does not quietly inflate your flight time.

Departure and arrival airports are resolved by matching the first and last coordinates against an airport database and taking the nearest field, as an ICAO code.

The route itself joins the group's Flights Map, so over a season you get a picture of where the aircraft has actually been rather than where people meant to take it.

What it deliberately does not do

This is the part worth being blunt about, because it is what makes the rest trustworthy.

It will never fill in your Hobbs or tach reading. A GPS track has no way of knowing what a meter says. Those numbers drive invoices and maintenance intervals, and a plausible guess is worse than a blank field. You enter them.

It does not file the log for you. The import pre-fills a form. Nothing is saved until you press save, and you can change anything before you do.

The airports are inferred, not read. They come from coordinates, not from anything you filed. For a strip that is not in the database, or two fields close to each other, glance at the code before saving.

That leaves a clean division of labour. The clock work is done for you. The judgement calls stay with the pilot.

Then it stops being a log

The reason this matters more in a shared aircraft than in a personal logbook is what happens after you press save.

• If your group bills by the hour, those hours flow into the member's next invoice at the rate you agreed, with no separate step.
• Meter based maintenance intervals count down from your readings, so the 50 hour check announces itself instead of being remembered.
• The flight joins the aircraft's history, visible to every member rather than living in one person's app.

In a syndicate, the log is not a diary. It is the input to everything the group settles at the end of the month. The less friction there is between landing and a saved log, the fewer arguments there are in November about what happened in June.

Try it

Open the demo group to see a shared aircraft with its members, its books and its logs already in place. If you have a track file from a recent flight, bring it along and watch a usage log fill itself in.

More detail on formats, fields and edge cases is on the flight log import page.