For dual-licensed FAA + EASA pilots

The FAA and EASA rarely disagree about whether a flight happened. They disagree about what to make of it. The same two hours can be counted and credited differently depending on which authority is asking — and the gaps are small enough to ignore right up until a proficiency check, a licence revalidation or a new-hire pack asks you to show your numbers under one specific set of rules.

Where the two authorities quietly diverge

Hold both credentials for a while and you learn the seams by feel. Three of them do most of the damage:

• How the time is credited. Cross-country, PIC, multi-crew and instructor time aren’t counted the same way under Part 61 and Part-FCL. A total that’s right for your US record isn’t automatically the number an EASA form is asking for.
• Currency runs on separate clocks. Some rules rhyme — the 90-day passenger recency looks familiar on both sides. Others don’t: the FAA flight review and IFR recency under Part 61 aren’t the same machinery as EASA rating revalidation and the instrument proficiency check. It’s the ones that don’t line up that catch people out.
• Limits watch different windows. FAR 117 governs US airline flight and duty time; ORO.FTL governs European commercial air transport. Different reference periods, different numbers. You can be comfortably legal under one and over the line under the other on the same roster.

The usual fix is two files — a US logbook and a European one — kept in step by hand. It holds together until the busy month when you update one, forget the other, and go looking for a number you can no longer trust.

What one logbook does for two tickets

You record a flight once. Set which authority the dashboard checks — the FAA or EASA — and it applies those rules to your flights and shows you where you stand. Switch to the other in Settings and the same flights are re-checked against its rules. No second sheet, no re-entry.

• Currency under the authority you set. The dates that matter, tracked under Part 61 or Part-FCL, and flagged amber before they lapse rather than after.
• Rolling limits watching the right windows. FAR 117 or ORO.FTL periods tracked against the limits you actually fly, each window green until it isn’t.
• Export in either layout. Print the record in the FAA (14 CFR 61.51) or EASA (AMC1 FCL.050) column layout — whichever office is asking.

The sharpest case of a bigger idea

Holding two tickets is just the cleanest example of something broader: a multi-regime logbook that applies any authority’s rules to one set of flights. If your flying also reaches Transport Canada, the same approach holds — you tell it which rules you fly under, and it tracks each of them from the one record.

Bring both logbooks over as one

Switching shouldn’t mean re-typing years of flying — least of all twice. Import the export you already have — ForeFlight, LogTen, Excel, CSV, an Apple Numbers file — and it maps your columns, then reconciles the import against the totals you already trust before it saves anything. If you’ve been keeping one file per authority, bring both; they land as a single logbook, and you see every number matched before you commit.

Where a single-authority logbook is the better tool

Worth saying plainly: if one of your two credentials is dormant — an EASA licence you hold but don’t currently fly on, or an FAA certificate parked while you fly in Europe — a good single-authority logbook will serve you well, and you can point the dashboard at that authority in Settings the day it comes back to life.

And none of this stands in for the regulations or for your own currency check. It tracks the hours and flags the windows; confirming you’re legal to fly is still yours to do. What it takes off your plate is rebuilding the same numbers twice, by hand.