Closing out a flight

Closing out is where a flight becomes a record. Done properly, one close-out feeds the training record, the aircraft's hours, the maintenance forecast and the invoice at once, because they are all the same record. Done sloppily, someone reconciles it by hand later.

What a clean close-out captures

When you close a flight, you record:

• The times: off-blocks, airborne, landing and on-blocks as they apply.
• The counters: the readings the flight ends on, which become the aircraft's hours and cycles. These carry their source and cannot go backwards; a correction is appended, never overwritten. See Recording counters.
• The technical outcome: either a nil-defect declaration, or the defect that was found. Every flight has to say what happened to the aircraft, so nothing is left ambiguous.
• The training outcome: for a training flight, the lesson is graded and signed by an identified person.

Why the technical outcome matters

The pre-dispatch gate has a partner at close-out. A flight that lands without its technical outcome declared is surfaced as an exception on the tech-log page, so an aircraft never quietly returns to the line with an open question about its state. Declaring nil-defect, or raising the defect you found, is what keeps the fleet's airworthiness picture honest. See The pre-dispatch gate.

What flows from it

Because it is one record, a clean close-out means:

• The student's progression updates against the syllabus.
• The aircraft's hours advance, moving the maintenance forecast with them.
• The charge for the flight is raised from the counters that were actually flown.

There is no separate step to "write it up afterwards", the write-up is the close-out.