For pilots who fly under more than one authority

“Multi-regime” is a clumsy phrase for a common life. It just means your flying is governed by more than one authority — Transport Canada and the FAA, say, or the UK CAA and EASA — and each of them has its own opinion about how your time should be counted and when your currency runs out. The rules rarely contradict each other outright. They just don’t line up, and the gaps are where the work lives.

Why one grand total isn’t enough

A single “total time” number feels like it should be portable. In practice, the moment two regulators are involved, three things stop agreeing:

• How the hours are counted. Augmented long-haul time, instructor credit, the treatment of a heavy-crew rest period — the conventions differ, and a total that’s right for one authority can be quietly wrong for another.
• What keeps you current. Passenger currency, IFR recency and the lookback windows behind them aren’t the same rule with a different logo. Being current under one authority tells you very little about the other.
• Where your limits sit. Rolling flight-time limits — CAR 700.28, FAR 117, ORO.FTL — watch different windows and cut off at different numbers. You can be comfortably legal under one and over the line under another on the same day.

The usual workaround is a spreadsheet per regulator, kept in sync by hand. It works right up until the week you’re busy, forget one, and find out at the worst possible moment.

What this logbook does instead

You keep one logbook. You record a flight once. Set which authority the dashboard checks and it applies those rules to the same underlying flights, so you see where you stand under the one you fly — then switch the authority in Settings anytime, no second sheet, no re-entry.

• Currency and recency, per authority. The dates that matter, tracked under each set of rules and flagged amber before they lapse rather than after.
• Rolling limits that watch the right windows. The last 28, 90 and 365 days under the actual regulation you fly, each window green until it isn’t.
• Totals credited your way. Night, PIC, cross-country, instrument, multi-engine — each counted to your convention, including half-credit for augmented time if that’s how you keep them.

Getting your history in

None of this helps if moving in means re-typing a decade of flights. It doesn’t. Import the logbook you already keep — a spreadsheet, a ForeFlight or LogTen export, an Apple Numbers file, even one with its column headers in another language — and it maps your columns, then reconciles the import against the totals you already trust before it saves anything. If the numbers don’t match your own, you’ll see it before you commit, not later.

Where a single-authority logbook is the better tool

Honesty helps here. If you fly under one regulator and have no plans to change that, a logbook built around that one authority is a perfectly good choice, and some of them are excellent. The case for this one is specific: you fly under more than one set of rules, or you expect to, and you’d rather not run a spreadsheet for each. That’s the pilot it’s for.