Aircrew logbook digitisation & enrichment
Upload a flying logbook — Form 414, observer's log, a squadron diary — and our AI reads every line, every abbreviation and every faded pencil note. Then it enriches what it finds: airfields, operations, aircraft fates and the crews who flew alongside.
Private beta in progress · early access opening to families and archives first
How it works
No transcription evenings. No spreadsheets. Photograph the pages, and the work of months happens while you make a cup of tea.
Scans or phone photos of any logbook — pilot, navigator, air engineer, air gunner. Whole books, loose pages or a single spread. Nothing leaves your account.
Dates, aircraft type and serial, captain, crew, duty, day and night hours, remarks — lifted from the handwriting and normalised against period abbreviations and unit records.
Summaries, timelines, maps, aircraft histories and connections — a reverse-engineered service record you can read, search, correct and share with the family.
Extraction & enrichment
A line reading “Ops. Essen. Cologne diverted. Flak port outer.” is not text — it is a place, a raid, an aircraft and a night that deserves an explanation.
Pencil, faded, half in shorthand, written on a hurried morning in July 1943. This is what comes back.
Every field stays linked to the pixels it came from, so you can check the AI against the original — and correct it where a human eye knows better.
Every airfield, station and staging post resolved to a real place with coordinates — including the ones written as three cryptic letters.
Operational sorties separated from training, matched to raids and campaigns, with target, squadron and the wider action that night.
First solos, forced landings, engine failures, decorations, royal flights, diversions — the entries that make the family lean in.
Air-to-air refuelling brackets, receivers and towlines identified from the remarks — the long-range trails and rangers that never look like much on paper.
What became of every serial: struck off charge, lost on operations, preserved in a museum — or still flying. Some are closer than you think.
Every name in the captain and crew columns becomes a person, and every person becomes a link into the wider database.
Reverse-engineered service record
Service papers are often lost, thin or redacted. The logbook survived — and it holds enough to rebuild a career, hour by hour.
Totals per aircraft, split by mark and variant, so a career reads at a glance: the trainer, the type they went to war on, the one they came home in.
Career timeline
See the career by age and by year at once. When they were 21 and on Tiger Moths. When they were 24 and on operations. The QRA years. The last flight.
Maps
Every airfield in the logbook plotted, from a grass strip in Lincolnshire to a staging post in the Gulf. Then the airframes themselves, tracked to the hangars that still hold them.
Degrees of separation
Every crew name links two logbooks together. Follow the links far enough and the chain reaches the names everyone knows.
The system walks the crew graph — shared sorties, shared squadrons, shared airframes — and shows you the shortest path, step by step, with the logbook entry that proves each hop.
Aircraft earn names, noses and reputations. If a serial in the logbook belongs to one of them, the record says so.
Photographs
Upload the photographs from the album, the tin and the back of the wardrobe. Tag the people, link them to an airframe or a specific sortie, and the picture takes its place in the record — dated, located and explained.
A logbook is the quietest thing anyone ever wrote.
We think it deserves to be read properly.
Flying Logbooks exists to bring military aviation history back to life and to honour the service of the aircrew who lived it — the famous few and the thousands who were never written about at all.
Mailing list
One email when early access opens, and the occasional note about what the archive has uncovered. Nothing else, and no sharing of your address.
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