CAFRS to civilian flight time: why the details matter
One flight can span several rows, and PC is only part of the PIC picture. Here is how ProvenFlight handles CAFRS grouping and civilian conversion automatically.
A CAFRS export gives you a lot to work with. Aircraft, hours, duties, conditions—it's all there. The tricky part is turning those rows into a civilian logbook that still tells the same story. There's a surprising amount of bookkeeping hiding in that spreadsheet.
One flight can take several rows
Take a 2.1-hour flight. CAFRS might break it out like this:
- 0.4 hours of day time
- 0.4 hours of night time
- 1.3 hours of NVG time
That's one flight with three portions. Import every row as a separate flight and you can inflate flight counts or repeat the same landing. Add the aircraft's total from each row and the hours get inflated too.
Those portions need to come back together while keeping their individual conditions and duties. Meanwhile, two separate flights on the same day in the same aircraft still need to stay separate. Matching the date and tail number alone won't cut it.
PIC takes more than finding PC
Duty codes add another layer. Looking only for PC can leave eligible UT, IP, IE and SP hours out of civilian PIC. If your duty changes during a flight, the conversion needs to follow each portion of that flight, too.
ProvenFlight's FAA conversion accounts for those eligible pilot duties automatically and keeps simulator time separate. It also keeps FAA-loggable PIC separate from airline aircraft-command calculations. Your qualifications and command assignments matter, and the FAA's PIC logging rules and an airline's application instructions can produce different totals.
A lot of spreadsheet work you can skip
Doing this by hand means working through the rows, deciding which belong together, checking repeated counts, splitting duties, separating simulator sessions, and then reconciling everything. Across a career's worth of flying, that adds up to a lot of evenings with a spreadsheet.
ProvenFlight handles that grouping and conversion automatically where the source provides enough detail. It preserves the original Army record and each duty and condition breakdown, counts shared flight events once, and flags conflicts for review. You can check the result against your records without rebuilding the whole logbook by hand.
That's exactly the kind of work I want ProvenFlight to take off your plate. Start with your CAFRS Flight Data Export, review the imported flights, and let the app handle the repetitive math.