Checkride Recommendation Log

Because the FAA does: examiners and FSDOs monitor recommending-instructor pass rates, and a pattern of failures can trigger 44709 re-examination attention or DPE reluctance to accept your applicants. Airlines and flight schools also ask CFI applicants for their first-time pass rate. A clean record of every recommendation with outcome and retest notes is both your quality metric and your defence.

61.189(c) requires instructors to keep a record of endorsements for knowledge and practical tests, and solo endorsements, for at least 3 years — including the kind of test or check and the result. Many instructors keep them for their entire career because renewal-by-activity, Gold Seal applications and employment verification can reach back further than the regulatory minimum.

No — Part 141 schools and most 61 academies maintain their own official training records, and those remain the documents of record. This is the instructor's personal layer: your portable evidence of activity that survives job changes, school closures and software migrations, in a plain CSV you control. The two should agree; yours is the one you can produce in five seconds.

By design: career and currency records are sensitive, and the simplest privacy guarantee is never transmitting them. Local-only storage means zero servers, zero breach surface and zero subscription. If you fly from several devices, keep one as the master record and move snapshots between machines with the CSV export.

Always — the CSV export is a complete, lossless dump of your instruction record, generated locally in one click. Import it into commercial logbook software, archive it in your records folder, or post-process it in a spreadsheet. No lock-in is a deliberate design decision: data you can't take with you isn't really yours.