Your Licence and Its Paperwork

Why it matters

A ramp check is short and polite: an inspector asks for your licence, your medical, and possibly your logbook. Everything they ask for traces back to one section — CAR 401.03 — and every item on their list is something the exam expects you to know cold. This unit is the paperwork side of being a pilot: what makes you legal, and what records prove it.

Four conditions to act as flight crew

CAR 401.03 sets four conditions that must all be true before you act as a flight crew member or exercise the privileges of a permit, licence or rating:

1. you hold the appropriate permit, licence or rating;
2. it is valid;
3. you hold the appropriate medical certificate; and
4. you can produce the licence and the medical certificate when exercising the privileges — which means carrying them on every flight.

"Produce" is the word to remember: a perfectly valid licence sitting in a drawer at home fails condition four. Since Canadian licences are now issued as aviation document booklets, licence and medical usually travel together — but each is a separate legal requirement.

The personal log

CAR 401.08 requires every applicant for, and holder of, a flight crew permit, licence or rating to maintain a personal log documenting two things: the experience used to qualify for a licence or rating, and recency. For each flight the log must record the date, aircraft type and registration, your crew position, the flight conditions (day, night, VFR, IFR), departure and arrival points, intermediate take-offs and landings, and the flight time.

Only the holder of the log — or someone the holder authorizes — may make an entry in it (CAR 401.08(3)). Your instructor's certifications, your flight review endorsements, and your passenger-recency take-offs and landings all live here, which is why an incomplete logbook can ground a perfectly healthy pilot.

Do you have to carry the logbook? Not on an ordinary local flight. But you must be able to demonstrate recency when asked, and the log is how — many pilots photograph the relevant pages or carry the booklet on cross-countries.