If you fly, or have flown, in the military, your hours are worth more than most civilian logbooks ever hold — command time on complex, multi-crew, turbine aircraft, instrument and night, formation, and thousands of simulator hours. This guide shows serving and transitioning military pilots how to get that experience into PilotIQ cleanly, structure it for career reporting, and turn it into a civil licence application.
PilotIQ is your working civil logbook and report generator. Your official service records remain the source of truth — CASA and airlines will ask to see them. The goal here is a clean, correctly-categorised civil logbook you build from those records, on your phone, that you can hand to a recruiter or attach to a CASA application.
1. Start before you separate
Squadron records, sortie authorisation sheets and your green logbook are easiest to transcribe while you still have them in front of you. Set your account up early and back-fill in the background — even a few sorties a week means your civil logbook is complete by the time you post out, not a scramble afterwards.
2. Set up your account
First time in, onboarding asks for your authority, category and licence:
- Authority: the civil authority you're converting under — CASA, FAA or EASA (change any time in Settings). Ex‑military pilots convert under all three, so the conversion tools work for each.
- Category: aeroplane or helicopter — if you fly both (e.g. rotary background moving to fixed wing), log each flight in its own category and use the Fixed wing / Rotary wing filter on the Logbook tab to split them.
- Licence: set your current civil licence if you hold one.
No civilian licence yet? Use the military onboarding pathway. If you've only ever flown in the service, choose the military onboarding path and enter your service number instead of a civil licence — you get straight into a working logbook without pretending to hold a licence you don't. Add your civil pilot identifier (ARN once CASA issues it, or your FAA certificate / EASA licence number) in My profile later — it then flows onto your reports.
As you build the logbook, the military readiness ladder tracks you against the experience milestones that matter for your conversion, so you can see how close your service hours already put you to each civil licence and rating.
3. Bring your service hours across
Two ways, and you can mix them:
- Import (fastest): Settings → Logbook data → Import flights takes a CSV/Excel file. If you can export or build a spreadsheet of your sorties (date, type, registration/serial, times, role), PilotIQ maps the columns automatically and skips duplicates. Build the sheet once from your logbook and import years of flying in one pass.
- Manual, back-dated: tap + and enter sorties by hand, setting the real date. Good for older paper records. Duplicate a flight (swipe on the Logbook tab) to knock out repeat sorties — circuits, continuation training, transits — in seconds.
OPSEC first. Log the flying, not the mission. Use aerodrome identifiers or generic route fields, keep classified locations, tasking and capability out of the notes, and follow your service's rules on releasing flight data. PilotIQ stores your logbook privately on your account — but a civil logbook is a document you will show to recruiters and an authority, so keep it unclassified by design.
"Sensitive flight" (OPSEC) toggle. For a sortie whose route or detail can't leave the aircraft, mark the flight Sensitive. The hours still count toward your totals and reports, but the mission and route detail stay on your device and never sync to the cloud — so you can log a classified sortie honestly without that detail ever leaving your phone.
4. Log in military terms — PilotIQ maps the civil fields for you
You no longer have to translate service terms into civil fields by hand. PilotIQ has structured military sortie types, aircrew roles and military check‑events you select directly on the flight, and it maps them to the correct civil categories underneath — so the logbook stays in the language you flew in while your reports come out in Part 61 (or FAA/EASA) terms.
- Pick your aircrew role for the sortie — aircraft captain logs as PIC (auto‑fills "Self" as pilot in command); co‑pilot / second pilot / supervised command logs as ICUS (the command‑under‑supervision that counts toward the Part 61 tables) or co‑pilot time; under training logs as Dual; QFI / instructor logs the hours given as Instructor. ICUS is the single most valuable field to get right for a CPL/ATPL application — the role picker sets it for you.
- Pick the military sortie type (continuation training, transit, formation, low level, IF screen, and so on) so the sortie is categorised without free‑typing.
- Record military check‑events — instrument rating tests, categorisation and base checks — directly, and they land on your record as check entries rather than notes.
- Instrument flying (IF) logs as Instrument (actual in IMC) or simulated instrument (hood) for screens flown in a real aircraft; night / NVG logs as Night with the dedicated NVG field so night‑vision hours are counted and reportable separately.
- Each sortie is one flight entry.
Your military qualifications — categorisation, instrument rating, aircraft captaincy, instructor and check‑pilot tickets — are held on your profile alongside your civil ones, so your service standing travels with you into the civil record.
5. Log your simulator time properly
Military training is simulator-heavy, and those hours matter. In My aircraft, add your synthetic trainer or full-flight simulator using the Simulator toggle — no registration required; just name the device (e.g. its type or bay). Sim sessions are then logged against it and kept in their own bucket, separate from airborne time, exactly as a civil logbook and CASA expect. Any role hours from a sim session (dual, or command per the device's credit) still flow into your Dual and PIC totals.
6. Separate service flying from personal flying
If you also fly privately — GA, gliding, or RAAus on the weekend — tag your aircraft so the two never blur. In My aircraft, set each aircraft's Usage to Work (service/professional) or Recreational. On the Logbook tab, the Work / Recreational chips then instantly filter your flights and recompute every total below them — so you can show "service command hours" and "personal hours" as two clean numbers without re-tagging a thing. PilotIQ also auto-detects RAAus flights by registration and keeps those hours distinct while still crediting them toward an RPL/PPL.
7. Capture what airlines actually ask for
Recruiters read a narrow set of numbers. Make sure each is being logged as you transcribe:
- Command (PIC) and ICUS — your captaincy story.
- Multi-crew time — flag multi-crew sorties so multi-crew hours accrue.
- Turbine time — set the aircraft class to a turbine class (SET/MET) so turbine totals build automatically.
- Instrument, night, and recency.
When you are ready to apply, open My profile → Airline / interview pack and PilotIQ generates a PDF with exactly these figures — command, ICUS, multi-crew, turbine, year-by-year and recency — headed for a specific carrier (Qantas, Virgin, Jetstar, Rex, Cathay…) or as a general interview pack.
8. Convert to a civil licence
CASA, the FAA and EASA all recognise military flying experience when converting to a civil licence and ratings — and PilotIQ has a dedicated tool for it. In the logbook, open the Conversion tab (shown for military pilots). It reads your logged experience and lays out, per authority, exactly where your service hours credit toward each civil requirement and where you still have a shortfall — against CASA Part 61, FAA §61.73 and EASA — so you can see at a glance what a conversion under each still asks of you. Export the conversion summary to attach to an application or take to an interview.
For the underlying experience record, the Logbook tab → Reports still generates the logbook summary (a Part 61 / 8710 / FCL.050 aeronautical‑experience breakdown plus a flight‑log extract) and the Flight experience report (totals, recency and hours by aircraft type) — attach these alongside your official service records.
These reports and the conversion summary are formatted extracts of your own records — they support an application, they are not official regulator forms, and the figures are indicative. Always confirm the exact requirements, credits and evidence for a military‑experience conversion directly with your authority.
9. Build and track your civil currency
As you fly civil-side — a flight review to activate a licence, a DAME medical, instrument recency — track each on the Currency tab so nothing lapses between the service and your first civil job. Turn on expiry reminders in Settings for a push notification before anything is due.
10. Keep your records secure
A logbook you will rely on for a licence and a career deserves protecting:
- Two-factor authentication (2FA) and a Face ID / Touch ID app lock — both in Settings → Security.
- Your licence, medical and ASIC/AVID documents are stored encrypted on your account — photograph them once on the Currency tab.
- Instructor and examiner sign-offs are locked with a tamper-evident audit trail, so a certified entry can be trusted.
PilotIQ supports your transition; it is not affiliated with the military or with CASA, the FAA or EASA. Your official military records remain the authority for your experience, and you remain responsible for the accuracy of your logbook and for meeting your civil authority's requirements.