In a nutshell, what people want to be able to do is to enter the totals from their prior (usually paper) logbooks. Most often the reason for this is that these paper logbooks have a lot of data that would be onerous if one had to type it all in. We have some users of ForPilots Logbook for example who are airline or military pilots with thousands and thousands of logged hours.

Now, as far as implementing the feature… There’s a couple of different ways I can do this. The first is to keep the carryover information separate from the logbook. For example, there’d be a dialog box with a set of fields in it (total hours, PIC hours, student hours, single hours, ME hours, etc) where you enter those totals. These totals wouldn’t be included directly in the logbook interface, but they would be added to the computation when totals are calculated. Thus you’d see them listed as part of your total time.

Option #2 is to write a wizard that would store the totals as a row in the logbook. Right now logbook entries are keyed to aircraft type and/or N-number. I’d add another type of row that could be inserted, a carryover row. It’d be displayed in the logbook like any other row of logbook data. The advantage of this is that we could have multiple sets of carryover data, and that it would be easily displayed (and printed) as part of the logbook.

I’m leaning toward option #2.