Why does APDL record OFF and ON times

pcohen

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 4, 2007
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What is the purpose of logging OFF and ON times? The original APDL only used OUT and IN times. Are OFF and ON times used in any calculations? As far as I can tell, they are not actually used for any legalities or logging off Flight time. So if they aren't useful, can we get the option of not having them at all?
 
APDL does use the OFF and ON times. They increase the accuracy of the auto night calculation, are used to display the "flight" time next to the block time below the OOOI entries, this flight time is used to populate the quick button to enter instrument time for the entire duration of flight, and also validate the instrument value entered (instrument time cannot be greater than flight time).

http://docs.nc-software.com/display/APDLDOCS/General

There may be an option to hide OFF and ON in the future but it is not a high priority item at this time.
 
As Andy said but I'd like to add a few points:

APDL for iOS is a complete rewrite and while we tried to maintain baseline functionality of APDL Palm/Pocket PC (year 2000 era) we are modernizing it and making it far more capable. We have tried our best to avoid feature "loss" i.e. something it did that APDL v7 does not and for the most part we're good with exception of about 1 to 2 items.

We do differentiate BLOCK vs. FLIGHT time but it's not required. Some only log OUT/IN "BLOCK" time and that's fine. You will get better results from the app if you add OFF/ON and with 7.0.6 coming out very soon we have AutoFILL nailed down so if you allow the app to use AutoFILL from Settings/General it will handle entering off/on for you. Give it a try but do note it is significantly improved in 7.0.6 which is the next update at Apple pending review now.

For night it does affect the calculation if you don't provide OFF/ON in scenarios where you have excessive ground time and you're not moving towards your destination. Small point. As for Instrument and other validation we do first see if you have FLIGHT time to validate your input but will automatically fall back to BLOCK of FLIGHT time is absent.

It's just the fidelity in which you want to log and as stated, with AutoFILL the app will actually do it for you.
 
Would it be possible to create a way of "locking" or "protecting" the times on a leg so that it would not be affected by auto OOOI? Most of the time it works great, and i'd like to keep it on, but occasionally it messes me up, like with a return to gate or a diversion where you have 2 legs with the same flight number. I had to change one of the flight numbers to a fake in order to prevent this. Or how about an option to force the autofill for a leg or day, since it seems unpredictable as to when it does the autofill operation. Right now the only option is global on or off. Will autofill look up times for trips that ended a long time ago, or does it only look up times for th he current trip?. If I had to make a correction to something that happened 2 weeks ago, Will autofill change that?
 
Yes, we "lock" your leg once it's completed and validated. AutoFILL only acts on missing data in certain scenarios. But first, RTG is fixed in 7.0.7, that came up right after we pushed 7.0.6 so we will catch that in the next build. Fortunately it's rare (hopefully). AutoFILL will work on the currently blocked out flight to try and log times as it gets them for you. It also checks all flights in the past 7 days that are not completed i.e. has an OOOI missing. In 7.0.6 you'll see AutoFILL has more granularity, here is the screenshot from the documentation which has a lot of 7.0.6 stuff already in it:

Settings General iPad AutoFILL.png

Note: AutoFILl for a past flight occurs starting 15 minutes AFTER scheduled IN so you have time to manually enter that leg if you want to beat AutoFILL.
 
So if you enter an IN time autofill will NEVER change it if the entered IN time is not the same as the internet time?
 
So if you enter an IN time autofill will NEVER change it if the entered IN time is not the same as the internet time?

Correct, it only enters missing times so if you manually enter it AutoFILL will NOT touch it.
 
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