I sat in my office looking at the credenza against the wall, and decided to pick up my dad’s old logbooks on display. They were next to the model Pan Am Boeing Stratoliner that my father-in-law gifted to me, exhibited among other airplane memorabilia I’ve assembled from my dad and grandfather, with a few items from my own flying. I pick them up periodically, read through them, and often learn something new about my father’s flying career in the 1960s and 1970s. His logs conjure up the smell of old airplanes and create a nostalgia for when I was a young boy and would fly with my dad. Somehow, the logs from later in his career are lost, so I only have the earliest entries. While I love the walk down memory lane, there is an emptiness to the logs. For some reason, my dad put almost no narrative in the comments section.
My dad lost his medical when I was six or seven years old due to a brain tumor. The antiseizure medication prescribed after the successful removal of the tumor was not compatible with flying. His flying was over, and for the rest of his life, it was like someone had taken away one of his senses. It will happen to all of us as we age, but the crime for him was that it happened when he was in his mid-30s. He continued to fly periodically with friends (and with me later in life), but the right seat and designation as “co-pilot” could not fill the void of what had been lost.
We talked a lot about flying over the years, but not so much about particular missions. I hoped that going through his flight logs again would shine some additional light on the type of flying he did. I am lucky to have photographs showing him with a plane and friends or family about to depart (or maybe just arriving) from a trip. Luggage, maybe a shotgun or a fishing pole lying next to the plane, gave a hint of the adventure, but there was no accompanying narrative. Many of these photos are similar, each one with my dad in his cowboy hat, a twin-engine airplane in the background, and hunting or fishing items waiting to be loaded into the plane. To gain some perspective on these photographs, I have turned to his logs and tried to match the date on a photograph with a date entry in his logbooks. Unfortunately, the logbook comments are minimalistic.
His logs do tell a tale, just not one with many facts. Truthfully, it’s a boring story. I have four complete logbooks with entries before he lost his medical. These tell me that he was a commercial, instrument-rated, single, multi-engine, and rotorcraft pilot. But I already knew that. The logs also tell me he was rated in a Twin Beech, Piper Aztec, Piper Apache, Lockheed Loadstar (L-18), the Bell 47, Ercoupe, Hiller 12-B (a machine that looks like it should never leave the ground), and many other planes and helicopters. Some of this I also already knew.
He flew commercially for a private company and worked cattle from a helicopter for our family ranch and others. Other than that, his logbooks met the requirements of the FARs but had little other information. For instance, a common entry was something like “Airwork”, “familiarization”, “Aerobatics”, or “cross country-Texstar” (the company he flew for). There is nary a mention of who he was with or why they were going somewhere. No information about the weather, the airport, who he met along the way, or why he was going. There simply was very little about his daily flying life other than the occasional more descriptive entry.
For instance, in March and April 1961, there is a series of entries that read “flew to airshow,” then “loop and snap rolls” in a Ryan PT-22. Then an entry flying an Ercoupe with 1:00 hours listed in “solo” that says “X-country parachute jump 2500’ static line.” I’m not sure from the entry who jumped out of the plane. The most interesting of all the entries is September 1, 1961, from Marfa to Alpine, Texas, and then on to San Antonio with an entry that says “charter (with dead body”). What? I have to know more. But sadly, no one is still around who remembers the circumstances. Four complete logbooks, and these are the only slightly more colorful entries.
I am now reading a lot of articles about the benefits of electronic logbooks and how they have limitless space, are not vulnerable to being lost (unless you cannot remember your password), how they tally hours automatically, and calculate currency in an instant. But who is ever going to read them? Who will grab your iPad a generation from now and learn more about you as a pilot and your adventures in the air and on the ground?
When I first started flight training, I purchased the Gleim starter package that came with a flight bag, study materials, an EFB, and a logbook with a few pages in it. It was the all-in-one “I’m a pilot trainee” calling card. The bag was always in my car with me, just in case an instructor called with a cancelled flight and wanted me to fill the void. On a trip to Houston with my wife, I went to the car in the morning to find our window smashed and the Gleim bag missing, along with my very first logbook. Those first, few, and precious hours of flight time were gone and could not be recovered. My instructor pieced together what he could, but my personal observations of the discovery flight and initial hours in the air were lost to the Houston streets.
You would think that because of that experience, I would now only argue for electronic logbooks. But you would be wrong. I use my logbook for so much more than what the federal regulations require. I use it as a diary – documenting who is with me in the plane, the weather, what restaurants we visited on the ground, how many fish I did or did not catch, and anything of interest from the trip. In some instances, with a particularly memorable experience, I write a full narrative and tuck it in an envelope in the front of the logbook. I imagine that one day, my grandkids will pull these narratives out of that envelope and get lost in my experiences long after I am gone. Or they won’t. But I sure did, even with the small amount of information in my dad’s narratives.
I picked up one of my own logbooks and read through it when writing this article. The entries brought back so many memories – taking my kids to camp, taking my wife and some friends to the Bahamas, moving my girls into college, and flying to Port Aransas, Texas, with my son on a weekend just to fish for a few hours.
I feel the same way about electronic logbooks as I do about the camera on my iPhone. There is so much in there that no one will ever see. I read an article recently that says we are no longer imprinting memories on our brains because we are always taking a photo or video with our phones. Our brain just assumes we do not need to store that memory because it is stored on the external device. Our memories of events now fade faster because of this.
We have a tradition in my family that my sister started, where we put a bowl of photographs in common areas around our house. I actually print photos from my camera roll and add the prints to the bowl. It amazes me how many friends sit next to the bowl and browse through the photographs, sifting through years of memories, even though the photos are of strangers. Conversations start, and others move in closer while the story of the photograph is told. It is intimate and sincere, and another moment that should be mentally imprinted.
The same is true with my logbooks that sit alongside my father’s logs in my office. Pilots and non-pilots alike pick them up and browse through them. They look at the entries and ask questions about the places the plane has taken me and my family. No one is ever going to pick up your ForeFlight electronic logbook and browse through it. I’m not saying not to keep an electronic record. Actually, I’m an advocate for both. Keeping both adds about 5 minutes to your day after each flight.
I have nothing so interesting as flying a dead body across West Texas, but I do have a few gems to be discovered by anyone who might want to browse through the years of my flying life. If a young pilot asked me what to write in the descriptions in his logbook, I would answer simply “everything”. Write down your observations of the weather, the plane, the people, and whatever you think you might want to talk about later. Who knows, one day your grandchild may be sitting on your lap and ask what it’s like to be a pilot. You won’t have to make up a bedtime story. Instead, you can pull out your logbook and tell a real fairytale.
