I am a student pilot about to take my private pilot check ride. I moved about three-fourths of the way through my training, so I will be doing my check ride in a different state from where I did most of my training.
While going through my logbook with the check airman, we noticed that I have four lines unfilled and unsigned that were lessons done with my first CFI, who is now two states away. The flights were dual cross-country flights and total 5.7 hours. The places we landed at and the length of the flights were written down, but the entries lack the details and the CFI’s signature and certificate number. Therefore, they don’t count.
I called my previous CFI and told him he’d forgotten to sign—he works at a really busy flight school, so he was always in a hurry. He said he’d if I paid for the ticket, he would fly up to Seattle to fill out my logbook so I don’t lose those 5.7 hours of cross-country experience. I can’t afford to do that and pay for my check ride. Is there a less expensive alternative?
Answer: For this one, we reached out to our designated pilot examiner (DPE) on staff, Jason Blair. He let us know that the flight experience has to be logged but not necessarily in the pilot logbook.
“It just has to be in a ‘training record’ of some sort,” Blair said.
For details, we called to the Flight Standards District Office, and the representative referred us to Flight Standards Information Management Systems (FSIMS) volume 5, chapter 2, section 7, which states the experience can be recorded in a “pilot logbook, training record or other reliable records as evidence of meeting the aeronautical experience for the certificate and rating sought.” FSIMS is the reference DPEs use.
Blair suggests the out-of-state CFI write out the logbook entry, sign it then send a digital image to the learner to put in their training record. Just to be sure, reach out to the DPE you plan to fly with and find out if they are comfortable with this solution.
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