Managing Airports in the Places Tab

How to get the most out of LogTen's airport management features

In LogTen you can manage a database of airports. When you enter data in the From or To fields of a flight it searches for an existing entry in the Places tab. If it doesn't find one it will search the internal database of over 27,000 places worldwide; if it finds a match it will create a new entry in your places list and copy the data from the internal database. If the field is STILL not found it will simply create a new empty entry in your Places tab and set its identifier to whatever you entered in the From or To field.

The From and To fields are much more than just a few characters, they link to a specific place that allows LogTen to do things like calculating the distance of your flights, instantly change how your From and To fields are displayed (in the Preferences you can select from Identifier, ICAO, IATA, or Name), as well as setting up a reverse relationship to every flight that uses that location so that you can look at a particular place and instantly see how many arriving and departing flights you have.

From and To places should always be a single identifier. Route information or Intermediate Airports should be entered in the Route field.

Many pilots like to record a day's flying as a single entry, and it is not uncommon to see a sequence of sectors in the From or To field. For example on a flight from Denver International Airport to Seattle's SeaTac Airport via Los Angeles International and Phoenix Sky Harbour you might see something like this in the From field: KDEN-KPHX-KLAX and then KSEA in the To field. As you may have already guessed from the first paragraph, this will result in a new airport being created in your list with the ICAO ID of KDEN-KPHX-KLAX: this is not ultimately helpful, since the next time you go to enter a flight to KPHX, you'll get KDEN-KPHX-KLAX auto entered because it found a match!

The way LogTen is designed, you need to enter the starting point and the endpoint in the From and To fields and then enter route information in the Route field. Note that at any time you can choose to Get Place Data under the Logbook menu (top toolbar of the screen)to fill in missing data from the internal database where available. This means that if you've got an airport with just an ID, such as KDEN, running this command will look up KDEN in the internal database and fill in the IATA, the Name, Lat, Lon, City, State, Country, etc. whenever that information is available.