Mixed military and civilian time: one logbook, two kinds of rows

Plenty of pilots fly both sides at once: an airline line and a Guard or Reserve line, service flying alongside instructing, a civilian rating earned before or during a military career. Two sets of records that count different things. The instinct is to pick one shape and force everything into it, and that is the decision you pay for later, when a reviewer asks where a number came from and the honest answer is “I converted it years ago and kept the result.”

Two kinds of rows, on purpose

ProvenFlight keeps both in one logbook without flattening either. A civilian row holds the PIC, SIC, solo, dual received, and instruction-given hours you logged, read exactly as you wrote them. A military row keeps its service categories, duty codes, and condition time, and never gets rewritten into civilian columns.

That separation is what keeps each row answerable. A civilian row says “this is what I logged.” A military row says “this is what the service recorded, and here is the rule that turned it into a civilian figure.” Two different claims, and a single blended column makes neither one.

Where the civilian totals come from

Civilian figures for military flying are computed when you read them rather than written into the flight. The source row never moves, which is why switching a convention re-prices the whole career at once instead of asking you to go edit history.

• An FAA-permissive view follows 14 CFR 61.51(e): a rated pilot who is the sole manipulator of the controls logs PIC, so primary, instructor, and evaluator time maps to PIC.
• An airline-strict view credits PIC only where aircraft-commander status supports it, gated by your effective aircraft-commander date, with copilot-class duty staying SIC.
• Non-pilot crew time (navigator, CSO, WSO, flight engineer, boom, or loadmaster hours) stays in the military record and out of civilian PIC and SIC, matching how the FAA and airlines treat it.

None of that touches civilian-sourced rows. The conversion rules only ever look at military rows, so importing a ForeFlight file cannot change how your service time is counted.

The real hazard: one sortie, two sources

If you kept your own logbook alongside the official record, some flights exist twice: once as your entry with a tail number and a remark, once as a service record with duty codes and an airframe serial. Import both without thinking about it and your career total quietly doubles for every flight that shows up in both.

Matching catches this before anything lands. It looks for an exact fingerprint, and also for the same sortie written down two different ways, comparing:

• Flight date and total duration.
• Tail number, airframe serial, BuNo, or side number.
• Aircraft type, departure and arrival, takeoff and landing times.
• Whether the entry is a simulator session or an RPA sortie.

A blank on one side is not a conflict, because your logbook and the service system were never going to fill the same cells. Two filled values that disagree are. When a match comes up, you either keep the row you already have and let the new file fill in its blanks, or add the flight anyway because you really did fly twice that day.

A workable order of operations

1. Import the official service record first. It is the version you can point at, so it is the one that should exist.
2. Import your personal logbook second. Where it matches, its extra detail lands as fill-ins on the existing flight rather than as a second copy of the sortie.
3. Import purely civilian flying last, whether that is a logbook app export, a spreadsheet, or photos of paper pages. The import guide covers what each of those needs.
4. Reconcile against an official career summary before you export anything. Summaries are cross-checks, not extra flights.

Currency counts both

FAA 61.57 counts are derived from every committed flight regardless of where it came from: three takeoffs and landings in the preceding 90 days, three night full-stop landings for night currency, and six instrument approaches plus holding within the preceding six calendar months. Simulator sessions are excluded, because the device and instructor conditions that make them count cannot be verified from a flight record.

Read that as what your records support, not as a legal opinion. Currency is still yours to track under your own operating rules.

What you hand to someone else

The PDF ledger prints in military or civilian columns, and it carries an export ID so a reviewer can confirm the document without being handed your logbook. If you are applying to the airlines, the airline application views and FAA Form 8710-1 numbers come from the same reviewed flights. See export formats for what each output contains, and the airline application field guide for how to present the difference between a military total and an application number.