Weird Advice

Hollywood

New Member
I found this kind of wierd. i know aprrox. 10 "profesional pilots". i put that in quotations because IMHO we are all professionals. just some of us are a little farther ahead in the game than others. breakdown: 2 major, 5 regional, 1 fractional, 2 135charter/cargo. currently im an unemployed (in aviation) cfi, cfii, mei. all joking aside, everyone of these guys has told me to pad my logbook. i.e. bogus flight time. i'm not talking adding tons of flight time or anything but consistently adding a few hours here and there. i just found it strange that all of these guys gave the same illegal advice. even more strange is a couple of the airline guys told me they haven't met ANYONE they currently fly with that hasn't done this. not saying i would do this but i found it interesting so i posted it.
 
Well I have never logged a flight I didn't make, but I admit - after a few years there were no more .9 flights - they got rounded up to 1.0

That's as far as I went.
 
Hey,
I didnt think you could get away with it?
If you log bogus time, then your flying school wont sign on it at the end of the month....
How does that work then?
 
[ QUOTE ]
Hey,
I didnt think you could get away with it?
If you log bogus time, then your flying school wont sign on it at the end of the month....
How does that work then?

[/ QUOTE ]

First a disclaimer... I have never logged bogus time. If I had, I would have way more than 350 hours. But, I have also never had a flight school sign my logbook at the end of the month, or ever for that matter. My instructor signed his lines, but your logbook is your logbook. It is on your honor that it is accurate.

In response to the padding question, I would recommend against it. (Of course, I am employed as a database programmer at the moment, despite my commercial rating...maybe not padding is my problem!) It just seems to me that if you have to cheat to get ahead, your victory will be hollow, and you will have lost your honor in the process.

Well, that's my $.02 worth.

Go ahead, flame away...

G
 
I couldnt agree with you more!!!
What i meant is that here in oz, we have our flight school sign off on it at end of month to say that as far as they are aware the log book is accurate! So i dont know how u can get away with it, thats what i meant.

Id rather be honest and get there knowing it was all me!

Cheers guys
 
Pad away. It'll show when you're a smoking hole...
mad.gif



Personally, in 25 years, I want to be able to look back in my logbook and know that every single minute was legitimate.

Be a man. Log what you can, and don't pad. Padding your logbook will get you nowhere in the long run.
 
Padding a logbook is like any other lie, eventually it's going to come back and bite you in the @ss.

Don't do it.
 
You know, the folks at Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom, and Tyco, among others, thought they could pad their books and get away with it.

Look at what happened.

I figure when you're thinking about doing something, you have to ask yourself at least two questions, and three if you're religious. The first two are would I be able to look at myself in the mirror every morning if I did it, and would I be able to tell my mother that I did it. The last one, if you're religious, is when it comes time to meet your maker, would you feel okay telling Him what you did?

If you can't answer all of those things with the answer "yes," then don't do it.
 
I see a lot of C.Y.A. in here
grin.gif


I don't believe in FICTIONAL LOGBOOKS but I challenge anyone here to tell me there logbook is accurate TO THE MINUTE.

How many of you log time exactly TO THE MINUTE? Do you turn on a stopwatch when you go in a cloud to log actual IFR?

Remember that there are three main reasons for logging time:

1) for FAA Ratings
2) for Insurance companies
3) for Airline hiring

Once you are past 1500 hrs #1 doesn't matter much anymore.

I've never logged a flight I didn't fly, but I know darn sure that if it was 56 or 57 minutes I usually called it an hour. I fly a lot of aircraft that have tach time so I use a watch to determine actual time. If you ever look at your watch you will also see that most Hobbs meters are inaccurate as well. I've flown a 4 hr flight on a C-421 and the hobbs said 2.7!

Back on the original topic:

Most of the check haulers (night single engine freight) I know lied about their time to get the job and they freely admit it. Yes, they did. All of them told me that once they got by the first month the logbook didn't matter anyway. (Interesting idea there ... well another thread maybe.)

Personal Confession:
I was sitting at about 800 hrs and having that faithless "panic attack" that most pilots have - "how do I get hours and get paid for it? I am SO tired of flying 172s around the pattern"

So I bought a blank logbook and started filling it out.

I couldn't do it. I hadn't been flying long enough! I started doubling all the hours on every flight I flew and I went over 8hrs a day many times. I started adding flights on "days off" and there weren't enough days.

I finally gave up and realized that I needed to "be patient." Maybe these high time pilots who had been telling me that since day one actually knew what they were talking about.

I threw the fake loogbook away.
 
I'll have to admit that before I started reading aviation message boards, I had never even heard of logbook padding!

It is absolutely baffling to me that someone would do this and completely compromise their integrity. Your integrity is an important thing that cannot ever be taken. To throw it away freely, I think, is a grave mistake.
 
It can come back and bite you in the a$$ someday if you're not careful. You can put it up there with PFT on the naughty list. It's cheating the system. You all want to be "professional pilots" then be professional and do it the honest right way. I only have 250 something hours, a long way from the minimums, but I want every hour to be worked for. It will make me a better and more proficient pilot.
 
[ QUOTE ]
I've never logged a flight I didn't fly, but I know darn sure that if it was 56 or 57 minutes I usually called it an hour.

[/ QUOTE ]

But is that really padding, John? If you do 57 minutes, it's .95 of an hour. Since you round things to the nearest tenth, that's an hour.

Ya know?
 
as my instructor told me once to get ahead sometimes



"Bic time is as good as PIC time"

and ive seen many people do it to get jobs, and the honest ones not.... so i guess it's tempting sometimes!
 
Don't do it.

This is primarily one of the reasons that 1 hour of military time equals about 1.5 hours of civlian time because so many yahoo's pad their logbook.
 
not syaing i would do it just found it interesting. especially coming from professionals. not sure if i totally agree with your last statement doug. i would think military time is more valuable because of the intense training and the fact they are flying turbine equipment. surely the guy flying fighters/bombers/c-130's etc. would probably transition into a crj a little easier than the guy teaching slow flight in a 172 for the past 800 hrs.
 
Don't do it. Personally, I don't care if you make yourself look bad. But when you pad the book, you make us all look bad.
I have had more than one Check Airman say that they can tell pretty easily when someone pads their logbook. I've even heard of PICs confronting FOs. You can lie in the book, but you won't back it up with skill in the plane.
 
Back
Top