Correcting logbook - Does this sound reasonable?

Acadia

Well-Known Member
I have been flying a Saratoga(PA32R-301) all summer and I realized this week that I have under logged my time. The aircraft only has a tachometer and I have been lazy and just added a tenth or two to each tach hour to get my log time. I decided to time an hour a few times and see how it compares to the tach on average and it turns out that I should have been adding .3 - .4 per tach hour to get true flight time.

Anyway I was thinking of just making an entry adding a tenth (being conservative) for every hour in the aircraft and describing the correction in the comments. For you high time folks this might sound stupid, but it ends up being nearly 20 more hours of HP/Complex time in my logbook (and im trying close on 1000hrs). I hate to give away any time that should be in the logbook, but Im not going to go back and correct each entry. Does making an single entry correction like this sound acceptable?
 
do two things.

1. get an electronic log book, put in the times as you see fit (with the corrections)
2. Make a one item correction in the times reference spreadsheet. When I put all my times on a sheet I found about 7 hours total in math errors.
 
While I was working on my CFI rating, I found that several logbook entries made by my PPL instructor had errors or were improperly logged. Since the errors were so early in my logbook (page 3 and 4), it would have been a real pain to make the corrections through every page...at that point I wasn't smart enough yet to do my column totals in pencil! Anyway, after asking several other instructors for their opinions, here's what I ended up doing:

On the pages where I found errors, I drew a line through the improperly logged flight times, entered the correct figure as appropriate, and then signed the correction with my initials. I also put an asterisk next to each corrected entry corresponding to a footnote at the bottom of the page which read "Improperly logged time - column totals corrected with log entry dated 07/14/2003". A couple dozen pages later, the logbook entry for 7/14 reads "Correction for log entry errors in 2001, dated 1/13, 1/21, 2/18, 4/29, & 5/5; Subtracted improperly logged Dual & PIC time".

Probably a bit of overkill, but I'm sure anyone looking at my logbook in the future will see that I made an genuine effort to log my time honestly. Anyway, you can probably do the same thing with your corrections to the Saratoga time, just make sure you document what you're doing very specifically in the remarks so it doesn't look like you're trying to pull a fast one! To tell the truth, I don't have any idea whether adding a few tenths after the fact to each flight will be considered valid or not; someone else will have to answer that one...
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