GPS & FLARM Tracking

Why doesn't Flying Fleet use GPS or FLARM trackers for flight logging?

While GPS and FLARM trackers are excellent for navigation and situational awareness, they are inherently inaccurate when it comes to official flight time logging and maintaining legal flight logs. We investigated in a lot of different solutions, like an integration with navigation software track and using FLARM data. However so far we did not archive a usable result and for this reason we cannot offer such automated workflow.

The three main reasons why we do not use them for automated data capture are:

Incorrect Flight Durations (The Definition of "Time")

• GPS and FLARM trackers rely on speed thresholds to start logging. They often miss exact times entirely or trigger late during takeoff, resulting in a different total flight duration compared to the aircraft’s built-in FTI (Flight Time Indicator) or Hobbs meter. You may have experienced frequent deviations of tracked times compared to FTI or Hobbs meter of the aircraft.

Touch & Go vs. Go Around

• GPS is notoriously imprecise on the vertical axis (altitude). Because of this, standard trackers cannot reliably distinguish between a Touch & Go (wheels touching the runway) and a Go Around (aborting the approach in the air). For accurate airport accounting and logbooks, this distinction is critical.

Time Lags and Signal Dropouts

• Smartphones, tablets and consumer-grade trackers operate on power-saving cycles and low sampling rates and suffer from signal shielding inside aluminum or carbon cockpits. This regularly causes time discrepancies of up to a minute or more during takeoffs and landings.

To ensure legally compliant, audit-proof, and accurate data for airfields and pilots, Flying Fleet does not rely on automated GPS or FLARM tracking times. This guarantees that our data perfectly matches the actual aircraft log.