The flight logbook in a volunteer fire brigade: obligation, good practice or a waste of time?

The question comes back in every Polish volunteer fire brigade (OSP) that has a drone. Does a flight logbook have to be kept? The law answers: it depends on the category of the flight. Practice gives a shorter answer.

What the law says

Drone flights in the European Union are governed by Regulation 2019/947. An OSP is an association and flies as an ordinary civil operator. The rules provided for the State Fire Service do not cover it. The only difference from other operators is a temporary exemption granted by the President of the Polish Civil Aviation Authority to the public sector, which makes flights under STS scenarios easier.

The unit is the operator. It is the unit that registers, receives the operator number, holds the mandatory liability insurance and is responsible for flights carried out on its behalf. Not the individual pilot.

Open category. Most flights in units take place in the open category, usually in subcategory A2. Here the rules do not require a flight logbook explicitly. They require something else: the operator has to designate a pilot for each flight, make sure the pilot holds the right certificates and keep the equipment in working order. There is no obligation to keep records. There is an obligation that cannot be demonstrated without them.

Specific category. A flight far from the pilot or over a densely populated area often no longer fits in the open category. The unit then flies under an STS scenario, based on a declaration. Here the obligation is explicit. The operator keeps and retains, for at least three years, records of:

• the operations carried out, including unusual technical and operational occurrences,
• the qualifications and training of pilots and other personnel,
• maintenance of the drones.

A unit that flies in A2 one day and under STS the next has to keep records for some of its flights anyway. Keeping them for all flights is simpler than tracking which flight was which.

Why a service should always have one

Formally, the open category does not require a logbook. In a rescue unit, however, there are reasons that aviation law does not describe.

Equipment in a fire brigade has a keeper. Every device in the station is maintained by someone who keeps its records. A drone should be no exception. Someone has to know how much it has flown, when it was updated and when it was inspected.

There are many pilots. A unit may have several, sometimes more than a dozen. They fly in different conditions, at different times of day, on different operations. Without a register nobody knows who is current and who has not held a drone for a year. Every one of them has a certificate. Only those who fly have the practice.

A record protects the pilot and the operator. After an incident, accusations come easily. Flight documentation shows what really happened and defends those who did everything correctly.

An inspection does not ask about the category. It asks who flew, with what and under which rules. So does the insurer after damage and the municipality when accounting for the purchase.

For the same reasons units write down their own flying rules in an operations manual, even when the regulations do not require it. Who may fly on an operation, what to do in an emergency, how to proceed at night and in difficult weather. The flight logbook is the other half of that order: it shows the rules are working.

What an entry should contain

A good flight logbook answers simple questions: who, with what, when, where and in which mode. In practice an entry contains:

• the date, take-off time and flight time,
• the drone: model and serial number,
• the pilot and the operator number,
• the location of the flight,
• the operation category and flight mode, for example within visual line of sight,
• the purpose of the flight and remarks, especially about unusual occurrences.

A waste of time? Only when written by hand

The waste-of-time objection is fair. A logbook kept in a paper notebook means work after the operation, from memory, often the next day. Times are approximate, locations described in words. After a few months the entries get shorter, and then they stop.

Meanwhile the drone records all of it by itself. Every flight leaves a log in the controller: route, times, altitudes, serial number. Copying that data into a notebook means doing by hand something that already exists.

What this looks like in FLAARE

In FLAARE the flight logbook is built from logs. After a flight it is enough to upload the log file from the controller, and the entry creates itself: with the route, times, altitude and the drone’s serial number.

Three things the drone does not know remain to be filled in: the operation category, mission type and flight mode. That takes a few clicks.

A flight that left no log can be added manually. It goes into the logbook on equal terms with the others.

The entire logbook can be exported to an XLSX file: with the operator number, pilots and operation categories. The export can be narrowed to one pilot or a date range, for example to check who flew how much in the last quarter.

The answer to the question in the title

Obligation: in the specific category yes, in the open category not explicitly. Good practice: in a service, always. A waste of time: only when the logbook is written by a person, not by a system.

What else falls apart in a unit with no process around the drone is covered in a separate post: Why a volunteer fire brigade needs a drone system, not just a drone.