Eblo

What's a Beezer?

A while ago, I started looking for a way to keep track of and post my flying experiences online. All pilots keep logbooks of their flights - it's a requirement for various things, mostly relating to training and maintaining currency (in the FAA's eyes, the pilot's own eyes, the eyes of the insurance companies, etc). But I wanted something better than paper. Googling a bit, I stumbled across a guy who had done what I was looking to do and was willing to share his source code.

I've made a few tweaks since I got the code from Beezer, most of it cleanup of references to other pages internal to his website, etc. The logbook is written in PHP and uses mySQL to store the data. If you're interested in the source, I'll work out something with Beezer and could probably distribute what he sent me as well as my diffs.

The log book summarizes all flights, showing recency and average statistics, and you can even look up time logged in a specific aircraft. If you look at a specific flight, you'll see a map of the route flown (based on airports landed at, not actual ground track). One thing I still need to figure out is how to get MovableType to import the logbook data for displaying it inline in entries like this and my flight summaries. For now, I'll just have to point to the full logbook: http://tantalus.dnsalias.net/beezerLogbook/.

Anyway, many thanks to Scott Beason for building and sharing a nice system that has been fun to tweak and make custom changes to. More changes are planned/hoped for the future including a "URL" field to link to longer write-ups of the flights. But it's all about having the time.

On that note, I'm out.