Project
Navy Logbook Digitizer
An attempt to turn Navy paper flight logs into trustworthy digital records. The prototype taught me that this was a place where AI still needed much tighter supervision.
What this is
The Navy Logbook Digitizer is a local pipeline for turning paper Navy flight logbooks into auditable electronic records. It is built on one principle. The paper logbooks are the source of truth, and nothing in the pipeline should obscure or overwrite them.
The problem with automation here
Flight logbook conversion is a place where confident automation is dangerous. The Navy-to-civilian rules are specific. Simulator time does not become flight time, special aircrew categories are treated differently, and PIC and SIC designations matter for FAA totals. A system that guesses at ambiguous entries and quietly applies the wrong rule produces a logbook that looks clean but is wrong in ways that only surface during an airline background check.
This pipeline does the reverse. It flags anything uncertain, keeps every raw entry, and makes a human resolve the ambiguities before the normalized output is trusted.
How it works
Scanned pages go into an input directory. Entries get transcribed into a raw ledger, either by hand or with AI-assisted extraction. The normalization step applies conversion rules from a configurable CSV ruleset and produces civilian-format output, and anything that cannot be normalized with confidence goes to a review queue.
A local web workbench handles transcription, the review queue, and inspecting results, all running locally with no external services. The CLI and the web UI share the same input and output files, so you can move between them freely.
Every normalized entry keeps its source, down to which logbook, page, line, and scanned image. The audit trail is the whole point.
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