Imported entries and duplicates
Flights you import get the status Imported. They count toward your totals straight away, and you can finalise them later. Scans catch duplicates; spreadsheet imports do not.
Every flight that comes in through an import, whether from a spreadsheet, LogTen Pro or a scanned page, lands in your logbook with the status Imported. This article explains what that status means and how Pilot Lab handles flights that might already be in your logbook.
What Imported means
Pilot Lab has five entry statuses: Draft, Imported, Final, Signed and Locked. Imported sits between Draft and Final.
- It counts. An imported flight counts toward your totals, currency, licence progress and regulatory exports, the same as a final one. Reviewing the import and confirming it is what makes it trusted. Your paper logbook is the original record for those flights.
- It is not certified. Old paper entries often lack things a final entry needs, such as aerodromes or flight rules. So an imported flight is not marked Final automatically. Block times are not needed: the total written in your source logbook is enough.
- Changes are recorded. You can edit an imported flight, and every change is kept in its history, as it is for a final entry.
In your logbook the Imported badge is purple, so you can tell it apart from amber drafts and green final entries.
Making an imported flight Final
If you want an imported flight to be Final, open it and fill in what is missing. When an imported entry cannot be finalised yet, its status badge shows a warning icon. Hover it to see Finalization requirements, the list of what still needs filling in. Once the list is empty you can finalise it like any other entry.
You do not have to do this. Imported flights already count, and many pilots leave historical flights as Imported.
Imported flights and exports
The regulatory export profiles include imported flights. In the export form's Status filter there is no separate Imported option, so leave it on All to include them. See Export your logbook.
Duplicates
What happens to a flight that is already in your logbook depends on how you import it.
Scanned pages: checked for you
When a scanned page is read, each line is compared with the flights already in your logbook. A line that matches is marked Duplicate in the review, tinted red, and the page cannot be imported until you decide:
- Skip this line: the flight stays as it is in your logbook and the line is not imported.
- Import it anyway: the line is imported as a new flight, for example when you genuinely flew the same aircraft twice that day.
The Duplicates filter above the review table shows only those lines. See Check and correct a scanned page.
Spreadsheets and LogTen: not checked
The structured import (CSV, Excel and LogTen Pro) does not compare rows with your existing flights. Every valid row becomes a new entry. If you import the same file twice, or a file that overlaps flights you already logged by hand, you will have duplicates.
To avoid that:
- Import each file once. If you need to import again, cut the file down to the flights that are not in Pilot Lab yet.
- If you have been logging recent flights in Pilot Lab, remove those rows from the spreadsheet before importing your history.
If you do end up with duplicates, delete the extra entries from your logbook. Deleting a flight in Pilot Lab keeps a record of it in the entry's history, and your totals update straight away because they are always worked out from the flights that are not deleted.
Imports never overwrite
No import changes or replaces an entry that is already in your logbook. Imports only ever add new entries. The worst case is a duplicate, which you can delete, never a flight silently changed.
Undoing an import
For a scanned page, Undo import removes the flights that page created, as long as you have not edited or finalised them since. See Check and correct a scanned page.
A spreadsheet or LogTen import has no undo button. Delete the entries you do not want from your logbook.