Appreciating the Importance of Aircraft Logs

Losing your aircraft logbooks can be devastating, possibly leading to tragic repercussions.

Wednesday, September 14, 2022 at 08:16 AM ET

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It’s easy to underestimate the importance and value of an aircraft’s logbooks. This flimsy cardboard box will soon be upgraded to a fireproof safe. [Photo: Jason McDowell]

Key Takeaways:

Aircraft logbooks are critically important for documenting maintenance history, airworthiness directives, and damage, and their loss can devastate an airplane's value (40-60% decrease).
Unlike pilot logbooks, which can be partially recreated, the complete loss of aircraft logbooks makes proving an aircraft's airworthiness incredibly difficult and can render it nearly impossible to sell or finance.
Safeguarding these irreplaceable documents is crucial, with solutions including secure physical storage and professional digitization services that create searchable, cloud-based backups and can even audit airworthiness.

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A few weeks ago, I was house sitting at a friend’s place while he was out of town. During this time, he had an annual scheduled for his Stearman biplane. He asked me to drop his aircraft logbooks off at the hangar so his mechanic could make the necessary entries. I had a pretty full schedule, but I agreed to do so.

Over the next couple of days, my schedule became increasingly full, and I realized it was going to be very difficult to make that trip over to the hangar. Fortunately, a mutual acquaintance happened to be heading there and offered to drop the Stearman logs off for me. I took him up on the offer, thanked him, and the delivery went fine.