Plan a flight in the Planner
Put upcoming flights on a calendar, arm ADS-B tracking so the draft entry fills itself, and turn the flight into a logbook entry when you land.
The Planner is a calendar for flights you haven't flown yet. Each planned flight gets a draft logbook entry straight away, so once you've flown there's nothing to type twice.
The Planner is free. It appears as Planner in the sidebar of a personal logbook, just under Home.
The Planner screen
- New planned flight at the top left opens the full form.
- Today, the previous and next arrows, and Day, Week or Month move around the calendar. Week is the default.
- The left rail has a mini month, Go to date…, and three sections:
- Layers turns Planned flights, Club bookings and Logged flights on or off.
- Time switches between Local and Zulu. This only changes how times are shown; Pilot Lab stores them in UTC.
- Upcoming lists what's ahead, grouped by day.
Keyboard shortcuts: N new flight, T today, ← and → to move, 1, 2 and 3 for day, week and month, G go to date, Z switch Zulu and local, and Ctrl+K (or ⌘K) for the Planner command menu.
Plan a flight
Quick way. Drag across the calendar to draw a time slot. A small Flight panel opens where you can set a title, start and end, date, Departure and Arrival, and a description. Choose Create. To add an aircraft or invite someone, choose Open in panel.
Full form. Choose New planned flight. The form has three groups:
- Schedule: Start, End and Repeat (Does not repeat, Weekly or Every two weeks). A repeating flight creates the next four occurrences.
- Flight: Flight number (for airline flights, see below), Departure, Arrival, the aircraft, and Route notes for your plan, fuel stops or briefing notes.
- Sharing & reminders: Invite someone by email, set Their role (Friend, Passenger, Copilot, Instructor or Observer), and choose a Reminder (24 hours, 2 hours or 30 minutes before, sent by email).
Choose Save planned flight. Times in the full form are in your computer's local time.
You can drag a flight to move it or drag its edge to change its length, in 15-minute steps. Right-click a flight to Edit, Duplicate, change its colour or Delete it.
Tracking and the draft entry
Every planned flight creates a draft logbook entry with the date, aerodromes and aircraft already filled in.
If the aircraft you chose has a known Mode S code, tracking is armed. Pilot Lab already has the code for aircraft on registers that publish it, and it learns the code for an aircraft once Suggested flights has found a flight it flew. The full page shows Tracking is armed under Flight tracking. When Pilot Lab sees the aircraft get airborne, the flight shows as Airborne. After it lands, Pilot Lab fills the draft with the actual times and route from ADS-B and the flight becomes Flown.
If there's no aircraft, or the aircraft's Mode S code isn't known, and the flight has no flight number, tracking stays off. You'll see Tracking is off. Add an aircraft with a known tail, or a flight number, to arm automatic capture. If the aircraft was never seen, you'll see No ADSB track was found for this flight and you can log it by hand.
Airline flights: tracking by flight number
On an airline you usually know the flight number days ahead and the aircraft only on the day. Enter the Flight number with its two-character airline code, for example NZ123 or QF45 (not QFA45), when you plan the flight, or later in the flight's side panel.
A flight with a flight number and no tracked aircraft is looked up by its number once it should have landed: about 20 minutes after its planned end, and again a few times over the next eight hours if it ran late. When it's found, Pilot Lab fills the draft with the actual times, the flight number and callsign, and the aircraft it was flown in, and the flight becomes Flown.
- Pilot Lab matches the flight by number, by a departure time close to the one you planned, and by the departure aerodrome if you entered one. Either the three-letter or the four-letter code works.
- If two flights could both be yours, Pilot Lab doesn't guess. The flight shows as not found and you log it by hand.
- If the flight isn't found after the last try, you'll see that it couldn't be found for that date.
- Changing the flight number, moving the flight or changing its aircraft starts the lookups again. If you choose an aircraft Pilot Lab can track, it follows that aircraft instead.
- Tracking by flight number needs Pro, like Suggested flights.
Tracking fills times and route only. It doesn't attach a flight track map to the entry. For that, use Suggested flights on the entry.
After you fly
Open the flight's full page (click it, then the full-page button, or pick it from Upcoming). The main button depends on the flight's status:
Table: The main button on a planned flight
| Status | Button | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Flown (captured by tracking) | Convert to logbook entry | Finalises the entry and opens it |
| Airborne | Live, airborne (disabled) | Wait for the landing |
| Planned or Booked | Open draft | Opens the draft entry to complete by hand |
| Logged | Open entry | Opens the entry |
Convert to logbook entry sets your role to PIC and flight rules to VFR if they're blank, finalises the entry, and creates draft entries for anyone you invited who accepted. Check the role, conditions and times before you convert, because a finalised entry keeps a record of any later edits.
There is no button to mark a flight as flown yourself. Without tracking, use Open draft, complete the entry and finalise it from the logbook.
Other things on the full page
- Pre-flight checklist: add your own items and tick them off.
- Reminders and Activity (comments).
- Add to calendar downloads that one flight as a calendar file. To keep all your flights in your calendar automatically, see Sync your flights with your calendar.
- Cancel plan cancels the flight.
The Planner doesn't show weather, TAFs or NOTAMs for planned flights. Get your briefing from an approved source.