Harnessing the Power of Smart Groups

Smart Groups are one of the most powerful features of LogTen Pro. Smart Groups lets you quickly view your totals based on any attribute of your flight. So you can easily and quickly see totals in the left hand  ‘groups’ column of the LogTen Pro "Flights" View.

When you launch Logten Pro 6 for the first time, you start off with a few standard smart groups including Currency information for Day/Night and Instrument operations. Also included are a few flight time Limits for the different time periods: the last week, month, year, 28 days, and 12 months.

Currency, Limit, and regular Smart Groups work in very similar ways, but they will display their information differently. Currencies will count down the number of days you are still current. Limit groups will show the amount of time remaining until you reach the specified hour limit. Smart Groups are the basic option, allowing you to keep count of any value.

These standard Smart Groups are the tip of the iceberg! Dig a little deeper and you will find an incredibly flexible and versatile tool which enables you to:

• Track totals for ANY criteria you choose, and you can customize criteria specific to your situation ... want to see flights logged with night time greater than 2 hrs in a B757? No problem.
• Look forward and back in time – so you can make a “30 in 7″ duty limit that looks back 6 days and forward 24 hours for example
• Set maximums for currency groups, enabling you to handle currencies that require a certain amount of one thing but no more then X of another. E.g. 3 hours total instrument, but no more then 1 hour simulated.
• Choose from several options for what data to display next to the group, instead of just Total Time you can choose from PIC Time, Landings, or a count of matching flights

Here’s an example of how to do it:

STEP 1: Click the “+” button at the bottom left of the main screen and select "New Smart Group". Alternatively click “File” >> “New Smart Group”.

STEP 2: Name your smart group. For this example, we’re going to sort for a particular person's time (Torea) in an Aircraft type (SR20) and time logged as PIC over the last 12 months. So we’ll name the group PIC SR20 Last 12 Months.

STEP 3: Set the date range. You can look back as well as forward to keep an eye not only on where you’ve been but make sure you’re not hitting limits any time in the near future. So we add the last 12 months as a time limit.

STEP 4: Choose your criteria. Please play around with this, you’ll see that with the ability to customize criteria, you can pretty much sort based on anything your heart desires. For this example, we'll choose Aircraft, Aircraft Type and Begins with SR20 ... then we hit the “+” button to add a second set of criteria.

STEP 5: We set a second criteria for “Crew”, “PIC”, “Begins with”, Toréa.

STEP 6: If you wish, you can manually key-in color thresholds to let you know when we’re getting close to your specified limit or goal. You can also have the total on the left side be shown as Total Time, a Count of Flights, Total PIC time, etc.

Click OK and voila, your new smart group is tracking your totals.

P.S. If you want help setting up a more complicated Smart Group or further guidance, please don’t hesitate to contact our support team!