APDL is designed to be used to manage your legality compliance for a range of operations conducted under FAA Part 121 and 91K.
This page provides an overview of how the Legality system works. See the subpages linked below for more specific details on those pages in APDL.
The app specifically tracks compliance with the following subparts of FAR 117.
Legality is based on all Leg activities entered for a Duty period on the Legality or Legality, or imported via the Schedule Importer.
Legality is displayed throughout the app using the following lozenges.
Status | Description |
|---|---|
 | Duty period meets all 117 requirements * |
 | Current Duty Period has Legality Issues |
 | Future or Past Duty period has/had legality Issues |
The Legality lozenge found on the main menu indicates your status for the current or next duty period.
When navigating a sequence in Trip View, the Legality lozenge for each duty period is shown on the first row.
In this example day one is legal. Day two has two issues that need attention. Tapping on the Legality lozenge on any screen will open the Legality View.
If all activities for a certain day only contain Part 91 flights, a Part 91 specific lozenge will be displayed.
As certain features in APDL are not applicable to Part 91 operations, some pages are disabled.
Each Duty Period is represented with a Duty On and Duty Off time.
All Flight crewmember responsibilities and assignments assigned by the certificate holder must be logged as a duty period to accurately analyze your legality and provide a Legality Status. |
APDL Contains a number of pre-defined Payroll types to categorize your duty. Payroll types in APDL identify the tasks that a flight crewmember performs as required by the certificate holder, including but not limited to flight duty period, flight duty, pre- and post-flight duties, administrative work, training, deadhead transportation, aircraft positioning on the ground, aircraft loading, and aircraft servicing.
The basic payroll types that you will use most often with Legality are :
** See the Legality Section for a complete list of Payroll Types and details.
Each leg also contains a Regulation section. By default, Regulation for each leg is Automatic.
With Automatic selected, the regulation type used to compute your duty period legality is based on the most restrictive leg type.
For Part 117, the following Regulations are selected in order
For most operations you define under payroll, the automatic Regulation Type does not need to be changed.
Reserve, Split Duty, Consecutive Nighttime operations, and Augmented operations are special cases that need additional data to compute your legality correctly.
If you are importing a trip, the default import payroll option should be set to "Block".
If you are on reserve, you should set your default payroll category to Short Call Reserve, Long Call Reserve, or Airport Standby as appropriate. This will automatically set all imported legs to reserve. Otherwise you will have to change each leg to reserve individually.
In each case the legality engine will select the appropriate reserve type
Each airline codes split duty pairings a little differently. As a result, the schedule importer is not able to import a split duty period, therefore split duty must be manually entered. See the Legality page for details on how to properly create a split duty trip. The format is different than standard trips and failure to use the correct format will result in legality issues.
In accordance with FAR 117, APDL's legality computations for split duty are as follows:
The scheduled rest opportunity is not included in the FDP of a split duty trip provided there is at least 3+00 of rest scheduled between 2200 and 0500 local time.
This FDP time is what is used for cumulative limits lookback.
Split Duty Rest opportunity does not include ground time to or from rest facility.
Split Duty legality rules will not be used by if the rest opportunity is less than 3 hours.
Legs with a rest opportunity of at least 2 hours are used in computing consecutive night operations limits. Use the same identical city-pairs and Rest Opportunity payroll type.
For all operations APDL assumes a two person crew complement.
You have two options for enabling augmented rules.
When selecting Augmented Crew A or Augmented Crew B, APDL will increment the crew count by one for each position. This is the preferred method.
An alternate method is to select the appropriate Augmented operation type under Regulation Operated Under on the Leg Editor view. Selecting this option will assume the crew complement is three.
In all cases Class 1 rest facilities are assumed.
When viewing the Legality status screen you can override both crew complement and rest facilities under the assumptions section.