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FAQ > Safelog Pilot Logbook
Simulator Time Logging

Safelog is very flexible in allowing multiple ways to log you simulator time. However, there is no "one size fits all" answer, even for pilots in the same country or within the same regulatory environment. The answer varies highly depending on your exact career circumstances, the nature of the sims you fly, the conditions under which you fly them, and much more.

A great overall strategy is to learn what Safelog can do and then to consult expert and/or official resources such as your flight instructor / school, your airline/company, your national aviation regulatory body/authority, etc. You can also of course informally ask other pilots on the internet about this, but you should always bear in mind that there is a possibility that people are sometimes wrong on the internet (hard to believe, we know) and also that what is safe, legal, and appropriate for one pilot in some circumstance may not necessarily apply to you.

Ok -so here's some general advice about logging sim time in Safelog:

  • In most cases, you will want to create simulators as "aircraft" within Safelog, giving them some made-up "registration." Whether you identify a specific sim unit, or identify sims more generically or by type is completely up to you. Whatever you choose, however, the key is this: you need to give the simulator the "SIMULATOR" characteristic in Safelog. You can then further specify specific sim characteristics such as "PCATD", "AATD", "BATD", "Level C", "Level D", etc. within the characteristics screen. These will be helpful in filtering in the future.
  • If your simulator represents multiple aircraft, you will generally want to click the 'summarizes several' characteristic as well.
  • You can see totals of either logged flight or block time for "aircraft" with the SIMULATOR characteristic set by going to setup > category class fields and turning such an automatic column on.
  • If your logbook style doesn't have it by default, you can also in setup create your own custom text or flight time fields in Safelog if you want something like an explicit column specific to your sim time. This is an "if you really can't find what you are looking for built-in in Safelog, you can create it here" option.
  • Whether or not you click characteristics such as "airplane", "multi-engine", and so forth to your sims depends on whether you want time in such sims to count as totals in such categories. Again, this depends highly on your individual circumstance.

When you go to log a flight, it is up to you if you want to fill in the "total duration of flight" (aka "Flight Time", "Duration of Flight", etc) column for such flights. This will affect whether your time in such "aircraft" is counted towards your total time.

Please note that for some EASA-and-similar logbook styles, we also offer a sim type / sim type pair combo that is independent of the 'aircraft' field. You can use this as well.

In some cases, how you log sim time even depends on really specific circumstances down to the individual flight, including whether you happened to do that sim session doing certain tasks with an instructor who holds certain licenses and so forth. Because of such circumstances, this is really something we can't answer generically - we can only provide the tools for you to do as you find to be appropriate.

Use the info above as a starting point and please experiment with a few flights. Remember:

  • You can always edit flights to change things later. There is no harm in experimenting as long as you do it consciously.
  • That said, it's always a good idea to broadly figure out how you want to do things before you log too many flights. This will save you re-do and frustration later.
  • The filters and total screens can be very useful to help you find your flight times including or excluding simulator time as appropriate.
Please do experiment! If, once you've experimented a bit and you still have specific questions not covered here, please ask and we'll do our best to help.

Please understand that while we can offer general guidance on how to log sim time in our product, for liability and propriety reasons, we cannot offer any advice of a regulatory or legal nature ("how should I log sim time for (country)" for example.)