Airborne_Again wrote:
And has “always” been for Swedish aircraft, In fact, the Swedish CAA provides the log books!
Same in Switzerland, we have to use the FOCA published Journey Logbook or some other document approved by FOCA (VLL article 20.1)
Piotr_Szut wrote:
A UK plane with 2000 hours in the tech log has probably flown as much as a French plane with 2400 hours in the carnet de
Piotr, are you saying that a French aircraft must use block times for calculating time in service for maintenance purposes? This is not in accordance with ICAO which I believe counts only time in flight (ie from leaving the surface of the earth to returning)… Block times are for pilot logbooks only AIUI…. In any case, my homemade journey log records start, OBT, takeoff, landing and shutdown….so both flight time and block time are recorded….but I use flight time for the aircraft logs….
And has “always” been for Swedish aircraft, In fact, the Swedish CAA provides the log books!
Same in BE, too.
Amazing that some national CAAs provide the logbooks 
In Europe and the USA, you log airborne time for maintenance purposes and brakes-off to brakes-on time for pilot logbooks.
We have discussed this here many times and I don’t recall anyone supplying a reference to some national regulation which differs from that. But maybe there is one?
Club / syndicate logging practices are a different matter, and a lot of operations use only (what is in effect) engine running time (hobbs, etc, etc) because they have no other means of doing it and they cannot trust the pilot(s) to write down a truthful figure for the airborne time. Sadly, many renters cheat, as I found out when I was renting mine out many years ago.
Les heures utilisées par un exploitant dans les documents tels que le manuel d’entretien et les différents livrets doivent être les heures bloc à bloc
excerpt from the official notice:
It means that the maintenance manual and logbooks must refer to block time and not airborne time.
Piotr_Szut wrote:
It means that the maintenance manual and logbooks must refer to block time and not airborne time.
Doesn’t EASA decide that nowadays rather than the DGAC??
Airborne_Again wrote:
Doesn’t EASA decide that nowadays rather than the DGAC??
However, I did ask EASA to provide standardisation in the Part-M Light NPA.
Answer from EASA is expected Q2 this year.
This is really strange because it makes maintenance approx. 20% more expensive.
OTOH, how can it be measured? I am sure French planes don’t have a special meter which measures time while under motion. Surely the actual procedure – given that in general the renters cannot be 100% trusted – is similar to anywhere else i.e. you have some kind of “hobbs meter” whose reading is uses as the basis for everything.
That DGAC document is from 1993.
The DGAC document is old but my camo tells me it’s still in force
Nope. EASA Part-M essentially says that the aircraft has to be maintained in accordance with a maintenance programme which is based on manufacturer’s manuals / recommendations / etc., so what the MP says counts.
It is hard to argue that if the manufacturer specifies flight time, and in FAA land where the manufacturer is and the original certification was obtained that means airborne time, that this should be different under Part-M.
But that won’t keep boneheaded local regulators from saying something different and in extreme cases rejecting perfectly legal maintenance programmes.
