Tracking ATD Hours for FAA Compliance — What Your Scheduling Software Needs to Do

Logging ATD time correctly is a regulatory requirement, not a best practice. The FAA specifies exactly what must be documented for ATD time to count toward a certificate or rating. During an FSDO audit, incomplete or disorganized records can invalidate hours that students and instructors believed were properly logged. The consequences range from students needing to repeat training to schools facing enforcement action.

Despite these stakes, many flight schools handle ATD documentation with the same systems and habits they use for aircraft scheduling — and that mismatch creates real compliance risk.

What Must Be Recorded Per ATD Session

The FAA requires specific documentation for every ATD training session. This is not optional or subject to interpretation. Each session record must include:

Date and duration. The calendar date and the total time of the training session. Unlike aircraft time, ATD sessions are not tracked by Hobbs meter or tachometer — they are tracked by actual session duration.

Type of device. Whether the session was conducted in a BATD (Basic Aviation Training Device) or an AATD (Advanced Aviation Training Device). This distinction matters because the substitution allowances differ between the two device categories.

Name of supervising CFI and certificate number. Every ATD session applied toward a certificate or rating must be conducted under the supervision of an authorized instructor. The instructor’s name and certificate number must appear on the session record.

Tasks and procedures accomplished. A general entry like “instrument training” is not sufficient. The record must document the specific tasks and procedures completed during the session — holding patterns, ILS approaches, partial panel work, unusual attitudes, and so on. This level of detail is what the FAA uses to determine whether the logged time actually aligns with the training requirements it is being applied toward.

Certificate or rating the time is applied toward. ATD time must be attributed to a specific training objective. Fourteen hours of AATD time logged toward an instrument rating is not the same as generic sim time in the school’s scheduling system. The record must clearly state what the time counts for.

Device FAA Letter of Authorization number. Every approved ATD operates under a Letter of Authorization issued by the FAA. The LOA number must be documented in the training record. If the device’s LOA has expired or been revoked, any time logged on that device is invalid — regardless of how well the rest of the documentation looks.

The Problem with Workarounds

Many flight schools run into trouble not because they are unaware of these requirements, but because their scheduling and record-keeping systems were not designed to capture this information.

Schools scheduling ATD as aircraft have mismatched records. When the simulator is entered into a scheduling system as if it were another tail number, the booking record captures the wrong fields. Aircraft bookings track tail number, Hobbs time, fuel, and flight route. None of these map to what the FAA requires for ATD documentation. The result is a scheduling record that confirms someone booked the sim, but does not contain the compliance data that makes the session count.

Aircraft-style Hobbs tracking does not map to ATD sessions. Some schools install Hobbs meters on their simulators to track usage. While this can be useful for maintenance and billing purposes, Hobbs time is not what the FAA requires for ATD session documentation. A Hobbs reading tells you the device was running — it does not tell you what was accomplished, who supervised, or what training objective the time was applied toward.

Billing and compliance records in different systems. Perhaps the most common and most dangerous pattern is when the scheduling system handles billing while the compliance documentation lives in a separate paper log, spreadsheet, or student folder. When these two systems are not connected, discrepancies accumulate. A billing record shows a student was charged for a one-hour ATD session. The paper log shows 45 minutes. The student’s training record shows a different date entirely. During an audit, these inconsistencies call the validity of the entire record into question.

What Native ATD Scheduling Looks Like

The solution is a scheduling system that understands ATD sessions are not aircraft flights. Native ATD scheduling means the system captures all FAA documentation fields as part of the normal booking and session completion workflow — not as an afterthought or a separate form.

Session records capture all FAA documentation fields. When an instructor completes an ATD session, the system prompts for device type, LOA number, tasks accomplished, supervising CFI information, and the certificate or rating the time is applied toward. These fields are part of the session record, not optional notes.

Student training records automatically reflect ATD hours. The ATD session data flows into the student’s training record without manual transcription. When a student has completed 14 AATD hours toward an instrument rating, that number is derived from actual session records — not from an instructor’s mental tally or a separate spreadsheet.

Audit-ready reports without manual data assembly. When the FSDO requests documentation, the school can generate a complete report for any student, any device, or any time period. Every session includes the required fields. Every record links to the supervising instructor, the device LOA, and the applicable training objective. There is no scrambling to cross-reference paper logs with billing records.

Several platforms now offer this kind of native ATD scheduling capability. FlightBase, Flight Schedule Pro, and Aviatize each provide session documentation features designed specifically for ATD compliance, with fields and workflows that reflect what the FAA actually requires rather than forcing ATD sessions into an aircraft-shaped template.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

An FSDO audit that finds incomplete ATD documentation does not result in a polite suggestion to improve record-keeping. Hours can be invalidated, which means students may need to repeat training at the school’s expense or their own. In serious cases, the school’s Part 141 approval or the device’s LOA status can be affected.

The irony is that most schools are doing the training correctly. The instructors are teaching the right procedures. The students are learning. The device is properly maintained and authorized. The failure is purely administrative — the documentation does not reflect what actually happened because the systems were not built to capture it.

This is a solvable problem. It requires choosing a scheduling and record-keeping system that was designed for ATD operations, not one that treats every bookable resource as an aircraft. The investment in proper tooling is trivial compared to the cost of failed compliance during an audit. Schools that get this right operate with confidence, knowing that every ATD session is documented to the standard the FAA requires.