SAFA Skysailor Magazine

10 SKY SAILOR July | August 2020 Flight logging for Student and Supervised pilots Up to now, when students are on their initial flight training courses, they have had to log their training flights in the student workbook. Similarly, while in their supervised flight quali- fication period, hang glider and paraglider pilots are required to maintain a logbook recording their flights with the supervising pilot signing off each flight. This has been provided by SAFA as the Supervised Pilot Logbook. In addition, SAFA provides an online ‘Log Book’ system within the Member’s area of our website. Use of the online logbook system is not widely used by our members though, and this is a situation we would ideally like to change. We believe an opportunity exists to simplify our processes, reduce expenses, promote the use of the logbook system and provide a method of in- dependent verification of pilot records by moving to mandating logging of flights by Student and Supervised pilots via the online logbook system. To support this, we have been making changes to the software. In future, Students and Supervised pilots will enter their flight details in the online Log Book system – the logbook pages of the Student Work- books will be removed, and the Supervised Pilot logbooks will no longer be distributed. The online Log Book system will now identify Student and Supervised pilots and require them to select an instructor or supervisor from a list of eligible supervisors. Eligible supervisors are Instructors, SSOs or minimum PG4/HG-Intermediate pilots that had a minimum of 50 hours airtime declared at their last membership renewal. Because not all pilots use the online logbook, we can’t do real-time checks of pilot hours to determine if they are eligible to supervise. When the Log Book entry is saved, it is marked as ‘Unvalidated’. At the end of each day, the database system will automatically go through the logbook system and generate an email to each instructor or supervisor with flights to validate. The email contains an entry for each flight with a button to validate or a button to mark as invalid. There will also be a new screen where instructors and members can go to see the flights they have to validate and where they can validate them or mark them as invalid. Validated flights will have their status updated to ‘Validated’. Flights that are marked as ‘Invalid’ will be flagged for review by the Operations Manager. In future, when pilots apply for a more advanced pilot qualification (i.e. PG3 or HG-Intermediate), the Instructor, SSO or SDA holder will be able to view the pilot’s online logbook entries to verify that they have the required flights logged for a success- ful application. We would welcome more pilots making use of the online Log Book. The data entered would be valuable in generating information on pilot flying activities during the year, and give us more accu- rate estimates of hours flown. This information is important in safety reporting and can also be used in our negotiations with our insurers. The Winds of Change Over the next few months ,you will start to see some changes occurring in the way we do things at SAFA. We in the Ops Team will keep you informed of these changes via our usual communications channels. Today though, I want to touch on two of these – changes to flight logging for Student and Supervised pilots, and the development of our Safety Management System (SMS). by Iain Clarke, Safety Management Officer Mt Widgee, QLD Photo: Paul Reilly