The Plane Spotters Community.
I’ve looked at a number of online logging platforms in the past, to be fair they all have good and bad points. For me the biggest negative has always been that a number of these sites restrict your ability to download your log, some to just once a year – for a dedicated spotter a year can be a lot of data.
So I was pleasantly surprised to see the facility to send your log to an Excel spread sheet that can be saved locally, allowing you to have a local copy and an online copy (more copies is always better). Now to be fair, I’ve only entered 100 records into the site and haven’t had time to fully investigate it. But compared to some of the other sites that I’ve looked at the features seem to be quite good.
The database is fairly good, I know from personal experience how onerous a task it can be keeping a database up to date. Having nearly 2000 copies of the FAA Database Download going back as far as the late 90’s and hard copies going back to 1964, that doesn’t cover the hundreds of copies of other registers and fleet lists that I have incorporated in my own personal database.
Having checked the data out it is fairly accurate, but there are a couple of gotchas when it comes to inputting the data – but all in all it is fairly slick. Five stars on the ability to download your data after every logging session, pretty good rating on everything else that I’ve tried.
Once I’ve given the site a good test, I’ll post again with a more detailed review. But first impressions indicate that this site is better than average for an online logging platform.
The site is available here and is worth a checkout.
Support this site.
It does take some time and effort to create the downloads on the site, also there are a number of costs associated with running the site. So if you can consider supporting this site with a donation it would be helpful, if you find the site useful then why not treat me to a doughnut – or even a doughnut and a coffee if you’re feeling really flush.
But regardless of whether you donate or not, I hope that the contents of the files are of some use, also bear in mind that the files are all from the date indicated on the percentage bar – the next set of download files should be available early August – hopefully the Australians will have provided an update by then.