Flight Duty Tracker Options for Pilot Roster?

[Bif]

Let's just say I'm tired of manually slogging through an entire pilot roster's worth of individual FltDuty XLS reports, and would love to hear about some viable alternatives you folks may be using on a company wide basis (that aren't in-house). Does LogTen Pro work from a company perspective? I like it for personal use, but can't tell if it's geared for managing a group of pilots or not...

[robottxt]

Excel,  made by giant software company.  If you can't code in excel, outsource it to a coding den in China or India for cheap.  Upwork.com.

[Bif]

On 9/22/2017 at 5:01 PM, robottxt said:

Excel,  made by giant software company.  If you can't code in excel, outsource it to a coding den in China or India for cheap.  Upwork.com.

While I agree that Excel is very robust, I don't think it supports the level of connectivity required to pilots to update FDT times from the field and populate a central database. Of course, this could be accomplished by a responsible human component, but as always we are fallible beings and prone to error.

[Saifan Pilot]

I made this Flight Duty tracker a while back.

You enter 1ˢᵗ date to start tracking in cell A5.

Piot's name in cell A3

Click "Jump to today" button on the top to make the spreadsheet jump to today's date.

It resets Flight time accumulated after a 5 day period of no flying.

If it meets your requirements you're more than welcome to use it

Enter flight time in column C. Duty start/end in columns P and Q.

When limits are close to being exceeded they're highlighted in yellow, when they're critical in orange, when exceeded in red.

The sheet is also optimized to print well on a printer with headers on each page.

If you need any modifications or corrections, let me know, I can try to implement those on my downtime.

 

 

Flight Duty Time - v1.2.xlsm

[Bif]

Very interesting, Saifan thanks!

 

Still, my ideal set up would have all pilots within the company entering their flight times, duty day, and rest times into an app in the field that syncs with a central database. The bane of my existence is obtaining, reviewing, and auditing weekly reports from every single pilot. Not to mention the painful process of eliciting corrections.

Far as I'm concerned, the less steps that have to be done by a human, the less opportunities for error and the less chance my brain will eventually melt.

[88is]

Bif, why not use an excel form like the one provided and put it on Dropbox. My company does this for aircraft tracking and I find it works pretty well, as it can be accessed from anywhere with internet. 

[Bif]

Saifan's spreadsheet is really clean, I like it.

And the dropbox idea is a pretty good solution. However, we already have issues with pilots incorrectly filling out and maintaining FltDuty XLS and weekly excel timesheets (which also include FDT entries for cross referencing) without having to add an extra step of them understanding how to properly use dropbox.

What I really liked was Highland's in-house system I saw this summer on their EFB where you cannot fill out today's flight ticket without having entered yesterday's duty times. I like what I've seen of Cirro, and FlightOffice  seemed promising but I've yet to see a functioning program from them. If we already have an EFB in each machine, it makes more sense to me to have the pilot make use of that resource and a well set up program rather than having to battle with each individual's personal IT issues, subjective interpretations of flight time / air time / duty time, etc.

[Heliduck]

Air maestro.

[Bif]

Ah yes, this has been mentioned to me before.

Have you used it? Do you like it? Priced appropriately?

[robottxt]

Good software is not cheap.  Especially small market stuff like helicopters.  Good developers charges a min of 100hr and that's for the day,  not just when there typing.    Don't over complicate it with oh i want an app or this device that device.  Keep it simple, let Google and Microsoft do the heavy lifting and stop thinking your business is special just because its helicopters and need something full custom.  You don't.  Flight and duty is just a spread sheet, nothing more.