Help & documentation

MyTailLog is a searchable index of your physical logbooks and a decision-support layer on top of them — not the legal maintenance record and not an airworthiness determination. The paper logbooks remain the system of record (14 CFR 91.417).

Almost everything you see is derived — read from your scans by AI, or computed from data you entered. Values can be wrong. Treat MyTailLog as a fast way to find, cross-check, and forecast — then confirm anything important against the paper before you rely on it. Low-confidence extractions are flagged for exactly this reason.

1. Explore the demo — every account gets a read-only demo aircraft (N734DM) on the dashboard, so you can poke at Status, Timeline, and Ask before scanning anything of your own.
2. Enroll an aircraft — the FAA registry lookup fills make/model/serial from the tail number. Five logbooks are created automatically: airframe, engine, prop, avionics, and Other.
3. Capture or upload your logbook pages (and A&P documents into Other).
4. Extract — AI reads each page into structured entries.
5. Review — confirm or correct what it read.
6. Then Status, Maintenance, Compliance, Ask your logbook, and the rest come alive from your data.

Two ways to get pages in, both landing in the same review queue:

• Capture — use your phone camera. If the document scanner loads, it auto-detects the page edges, deskews, and crops; if not, it captures the full frame and you crop later. Blurry/glare shots are flagged.
• Upload scans — PDF, JPEG, or PNG. Multi-page PDFs are split into one page each, in order.

Pick the right logbook for what you're scanning — airframe/engine/ prop/avionics for running maintenance pages, and Other for A&P documents (see below). Pages queue on-device and upload when you're online, so capture works in a hangar with no signal.

Note: scanned logbook spreads sometimes contain two physical pages side by side — the extractor flags these so you can review both halves.

Extraction reads a page image into structured entries (date, hours, work performed, parts, AD/SB references, signature). Each field gets a confidence score; anything below threshold is flagged in the Review screen, which shows the page image beside the editable entries so you can verify against the original. Editing an entry marks it confirmed. You can re-extract a page (e.g. if a multi-page entry wasn't linked) right from the review screen — it replaces that page's entries. The Needs review / Processing pills on the aircraft page track the queue.

To move faster, Review all (button on the aircraft page) puts every extracted entry in one scrollable list — edit inline and confirm as you go, or hit Confirm N clean to accept, in one click, every entry the AI was fully confident on (high overall score, no flagged field, not a page-spanning fragment). Anything with a low-confidence field is left for you; use Open page ↗ on any group to check it against the original scan.

Scan into the Other logbook for documents an A&P shop produces that aren't running-log pages. MyTailLog classifies each and applies it instead of storing it as log entries:

• Weight & Balance sheet → creates a new W&B revision (empty weight, CG, moment), which becomes your current W&B.
• AD compliance report → treated as the ground truth for your AD state. It corroborates matching tracked ADs (they get a “✓ A&P report” badge), and creates tracked records for ADs it lists that you weren't tracking yet.

Every extracted entry across all logbooks, merged into one date-ordered timeline and filterable by logbook type. Full-text search finds work by keyword, part, or AD number (e.g. “oil change”, “magneto”, “AD 2015-19-07”). Each entry links back to its source page image.

Ask plain-English questions (“When was the last annual?”, “Hours since prop overhaul?”). Answers are drawn only from your extracted entries and cite the specific entries they came from, so you can click through and verify. It won't invent facts the entries don't contain — but, like all AI, it can misread, so confirm anything you act on.

The at-a-glance dashboard: every recurring inspection, maintenance item, and AD as a color-coded card — red = overdue, amber = due soon, green = current — with days and hours remaining. It's a read-only rollup of your maintenance forecast and recurring ADs; each card links to where you manage it.

Tracks recurring Part 91 items (annual 91.409, transponder 91.413, pitot-static 91.411, ELT 91.207, VOR, 100-hour, oil, TBO, prop overhaul) and computes next-due from the interval and last-done. Seed the standard set with one click, mark items done, or add your own. Regulatory items are distinguished from advisory ones (TBO/overhaul).

Connect your own MyFlightBook pilot logbook to pull each aircraft's latest recorded hobbs and tach into MyTailLog. There is no app-wide account: in Profile → MyFlightBook you register your own OAuth app on MyFlightBook and paste its client ID and secret (the secret is stored server-side and never shown again), then click Connect and approve access. Once connected, Sync matches your MyFlightBook aircraft to MyTailLog aircraft by tail number and records the ending hours from the most recent flight.

Because matching is by tail, a shared aircraft can receive hours from any connected co-owner — whoever flew (and logged) most recently supplies the current reading.

Honesty caveat: MyFlightBook has no authoritative “current” meter for a shared plane, and a flight's ending hours may go unlogged. So this is the latest recorded hobbs/tach, shown as “as of <date>” — treat it as the last known reading, not a live gauge, and confirm against the aircraft.

A daily background check emails you before maintenance, inspections, and ADs come due — and once they're overdue. Turn reminders on and tune the lead times in Profile → Notifications. The master switch is the on/off for all reminder email; below it, each category sets how far in advance you're warned:

• Annual inspection — a number of days before it's due (default 90).
• Oil change — a number of hours before it's due (default 10).
• ADs / SBs and everything else — both a days-before and an hours-before window (defaults 30 days / 25 hours); whichever is reached first triggers the reminder.

Reminders are grouped into one digest email per day, organized by aircraft, each item linking to its Status page. You're reminded once per due-cycle: after you mark an item done and it schedules a new next-due, the reminder arms again for the next cycle. You never get an empty email.

Note: the oil-change interval (hours between changes) is set on the oil item on each aircraft's Maintenance page — the setting here only controls how early you're alerted, not when the item is due.

Track Airworthiness Directives and Service Bulletins: compliance status (complied / previously complied / does-not-apply), method, dates, and recurring intervals → next-due. Look up the official FAA reference (Federal Register, with a DRS fallback) to confirm applicability, and explore applicability by tail/serial. ADs referenced in your logs but not yet tracked are surfaced so you can add them.

A reconstructed list of what's installed now, derived from your logs — installs and removals detected during extraction arrive as proposals you confirm or reject (nothing is trusted automatically). Use “Update from logs” to rescan the full history.

A history of your W&B revisions (empty weight, CG arm, moment) with the latest as your current W&B — plus useful load if you enter max gross. Enter any two of weight/arm/moment and the third is filled in. This is an index of your W&B records, not a loading calculator.

Advisory heuristics that flag suspected gaps in the digitized record: missing annuals (breaks in the annual chain), long stretches with no entries, and recurring ADs never complied or past due. Framed as “suspected” — a gap may just mean a page isn't scanned yet.

Print a full records bundle (browser Print → Save as PDF), download CSVs of entries / AD-SB / equipment / maintenance, or take a complete .zip backup (all records + original scans) that you can re-import as a new aircraft. Since the free tier has no automatic backups, exporting periodically is your safety net — and the way to hand an aircraft's full history to someone else.

Invite others by email as viewers (read-only) or editors (can contribute) — they get access the moment they sign in with that address, no account needed first. Owners can transfer an aircraft to another user, or delete it (type-to-confirm; removes all records and scans). Access is enforced by the database, not just the UI.

Sign in with a magic link (no password) or set a password to use either. Manage your name, A&P/IA certificate number, email, and notification settings from Profile.