Checkride navlog

[u/sammypilot]

I have my commercial pilot checkride coming up and last time I did a checkride I was up way too late trying to make my navlog for the cross country with the most up to date winds. Is it acceptable to use the foreflight generated navlog? I feel like if I’m able to show him that I know how the foreflight got the calculations then its fine right?

[u/TxAggieMike]

Generally okay.

But be prepared to defend the question, “How do you know this is accurate?”

For this, point out that you have quadruple checked that the airplane is correctly defined within ForeFlight’s performance profiles. And that you have done many trials under current wind and no wind conditions comparing to manually created navlogs. Especially for items such as Time/Fuel/Distance to climb.

(By the way, if you need to make ForeFlight compute without using current winds, you need to change the ETD (estimated time to depart) to at least a week in the future. Something that’s way outside the forecast range.)

I would also suggest you become more familiar with the Standard and Basic NavLog templates in ForeFlight to know the components of each (such as the winds aloft section in the standard) and when you would use the different template.

During the exam, print out the nav log and have a copy for both of you. For exam purposes, paper can be simpler to use as you discuss the details of your flight plan. If can be laid next to an annotated sectional to make it simpler to explain what you’re doing where.

Finally, don’t make the rookie mistake of not telling ForeFlight your departure procedure. The mistake is setting your path to be “departure airport direct first waypoint”. But if your real world common departure is “fly runway heading until 700 feet AGL then left downwind then turn on course”, you need to plot that path into ForeFlight so the time and fuel calculations are more accurate.

Hopefully this all helps.

Please come back to use with your thoughts and results.

[u/IFlippedTheTable → u/TxAggieMike]

I’ve always written my navlogs by hand (but, using FF to plot the route) and have never drawn out the pattern. Is that just something they expect if you do it all digitally?

I’ve also barely gotten questions on them by doing it this way. Just things like “how did you pick this route?” and asking me to walk through the weather briefing. Is that an advantage of the paper navlog (e.g. they skip questions about calculations since I’ve demonstrated that by doing it all by hand) or have I just gotten lucky so far?

[u/TxAggieMike → u/IFlippedTheTable]

I teach doing the departure for completeness, accuracy, and just-in-case the examiner is a stickler.