Bringing your existing logbook in
Everything here is about data that already exists somewhere else: a spreadsheet, an export from another logbook app, a stack of paper pages, or twenty years of totals nobody’s going to re-type. By the end of it your history is in Aviator Archive, you know exactly what arrived and what didn’t, and you can reverse the whole thing if you got it wrong.
Read the first one before you import anything. The rest will be there when you need them.
| Guide | What it gets you | |
|---|---|---|
| B1 | Where every row ends up | The model the other eight guides are built on. Read this first |
| B2 | Import a CSV or Excel logbook | Your flights, from a file, with an honest count of what arrived |
| B3 | Column mapping | Every column bound to the right field, saved so the next file maps itself |
| B4 | Date formats and time units | Dates and hours read the way you meant them, which isn’t automatic |
| B5 | The Review inbox | The held rows dealt with, and the badge back to zero |
| B6 | Import history and undo | An import reversed, and the original of any imported record |
| B7 | Previous Experience | Hours flown before this logbook, without entering the flights |
| B8 | AI Scan: digitise paper pages | Paper pages photographed, extracted and reviewed into the logbook |
| B9 | Manage scan pages and quota | A scan queue you can read, and a way to clear what’s stuck |
One way in
There’s no Import menu. Everything in this area except Previous Experience starts in the same place: on the dashboard, tap the Import / Export / Backup card, then choose Import on the segmented control at the top. The same modal opens from the logbook’s ⋮ (More Actions) → Import Data, and from an empty logbook’s Import Flights From Data Source button.
The first screen of the wizard carries four buttons — Import History, Review, AI Scan and My scans — and those are the doors to four of the guides below.
”Review” means two different things
The wizard’s third step is labelled Review. That’s where you check rows before they’re imported, and it only exists while an import is running.
The button labelled Review on the file-selection screen opens something else entirely: a screen titled Review (N) holding rows from past imports that never made it in. These guides call the first one the Review step and the second one the Review inbox, always, and never write “Review” on its own.
Imported hours count toward the free 100-hour limit
The free limit counts every hour in the logbook: flights you log by hand, flights that arrived through an import, and hours entered as Previous Experience. So a pilot on the free tier who brings in a career of 100 hours or more reaches the limit straight away. The import that crosses the limit always finishes, and everything it brought stays readable, exportable and backed up; from then on the app stops accepting new flights, including another logbook import, until you buy Pro.
Words this area introduces
Mapping — the link between one column in your file and one or more fields in the logbook. A column with no mapping is ignored, not rejected.
Mapping preset — a saved set of mappings, re-applied automatically the next time you import a file with the same column headers.
Import session — one run of the wizard, recorded so that it can be undone as a unit.
The Review inbox — the queue of rows an import couldn’t place: rows with a missing or unreadable required field, and rows that matched a flight you already have. Nothing in it is in your logbook yet.
Lane — one of the two groups the Review inbox splits into: Duplicates and To fix.
Original import — the verbatim copy of a source row, kept beside whatever it created, including the columns nothing was mapped to.
Previous Experience (also called brought forward, or carry-forward) — a single summary of hours flown before this logbook began, entered as totals rather than as flights.
AI Scan page — one image sent for extraction. One photo, one gallery image, or one page of a PDF is one page, and each one comes off your quota.