Under faa, the second pilot could be a safety pilot for ifr training under the hood etc… I understand the part about not logging pic time if two pilots share a c152, but why not log it as co pilot time as was the case pre easa. Technically, if I don’t have the 3 to/ldg in 90 days, I couldn’t go flying together with a friend who holds a license because under the law he’d be a pax. I deem it safer to take a second pilot with me than doing the 3 to/ldg alone if I haven’t flown in some time. That’s what I meant with „Stupid!“
I am sorry, but no, it isn’t. A plain vanilla PPL pilot has NOT demonstrated any abilities to somehow “add” safety to a flight by being “copilot” for another pilot. Full stop.
You can cite common sense as much as you want, but no.
The FAA case of being safety pilot is no good, because in that case, he (the safety pilot) merely needs to watch out for traffic, which is something that every private pilot learns during his training.
But your example of night flights for passenger currency with a second pilot on board is a lot different. Questions: How exactly is that second pilot supposed to behave during this flight? What is he supposed to do in case of problems? Take the controls and thus interefere with the pilot??? Or merely give some kind of verbal advice here and there? (Which, in itself, might create big dangers). No. This legally (and practically) isn’t possible. He (the second PPL pilot) isn’t formally qualified to do these things. He is, by all means, a passenger.
If what you say is correct Bosmantico, why do the DGAC here sometimes make it a condition, when a pilot has been declared fit after eg surgery, that he/she can only return to flying if accompanied by another pilot often for as long as a year?
I agree with others on here that the 90day passenger rule of 3to/landings is a PITA especially when you have to do for each class/type of aircraft.
For my MEP especially after a long winter I end up asking an CRI to go with me and log it as PIC. It’s what all the instructors and examimers have told me I should do.
Sadly IMO it is rules like this that are making people turn to the ULM. I asked a ULM instructor whether or not ULM pilots logged block to block times or from start up.He looked at me as if I was mad and said it doesn’t matter as there is no rule that says they even need a pilot’s log book.
If what you say is correct Bosmantico, why do the DGAC here sometimes make it a condition, when a pilot has been declared fit after eg surgery, that he/she can only return to flying if accompanied by another pilot often for as long as a year?
Well, again, a different case. Here, the “use case” is that when/if the gets incapacitated, the safety pilot fully takes over. Hence, there is no crew coordination involved.
Snoopy wrote:
I meant it is stupid that under easa, even if two pilots are onbord a single pilot plane, only one is considered a pilot and the other a passenger.
I agree with Boscomantico above. If you accept that more than 90 days lack of flying makes you a safety risk during take-off and landing, how would having a non-instructor pilot in the right seat help? Non-instructor pilots are not trained (and not necessarily experienced either) in recognising and correcting potentially dangerous mistakes during take-off and landing. They could very easily make things worse.
However, in the FAA world you can do this, and the USA – whose GA volume totally dwarfs all of Europe, while having as severe terrain and weather issues as anywhere else – is not littered with wreckage where something went wrong. So I wonder what the real problem is. Historical regulatory purism, perhaps?
The present European system creates a disincentive to currency, because many pilots (the majority, in some areas the great majority of renters, and remember renters form the bulk of GA, via schools, clubs, or whatever you want to call it, let’s not get into another “what is non-profit” debate 
… in certain countries almost everybody flying is de facto renting from their “club”) will not do a flight at all unless they can cost share it. Or they just don’t want to fly alone – ever. Lots of people will not come to our fly-ins unless they can find a passenger, etc, regardless of how short the flight it. I realise this is not an issue for most of the regulars here but I know sooo many PPLs who are firmly in the “no cost share = no flight” category. I think many don’t realise just how hard up so much of the PPL scene is.
So a lot of people simply stop flying over the “6 months of winter” which then creates a much bigger risk in April, when we see so many accidents, with a lot of fatal ones, whose primary cause was pretty obviously a pilot who had not flown for, ahem, 6 months! And, let’s be brutally frank about it, probably was not flying much before that… the PPL average is 20-30hrs/year so those who give up for the 6 months are probably at the bottom end of that distribution to start with.
And most of this exact category don’t want to fly with an instructor because of the extra cost and because (like most pilots ) they don’t want to fly with an instructor.
And the option of doing the flight with an instructor is not much good because it cannot be done with a freelance FI, so you end up under the “examination” of some school, which most pilots don’t like much either.
It is just bad risk management to force totally solo flying to revalidate passenger currency – day currency or night currency.
Peter wrote:
However, in the FAA world you can do this, and the USA – whose GA volume totally dwarfs all of Europe, while having as severe terrain and weather issues as anywhere else – is not littered with wreckage where something went wrong. So I wonder what the real problem is. Historical regulatory purism, perhaps?
Maybe the real problem is that a pilot isn’t very dangerous after more than 90 days, so any system would “work”.
boscomantico wrote:
The FAA case of being safety pilot is no good, because in that case, he (the safety pilot) merely needs to watch out for traffic, which is something that every private pilot learns during his training.
The US regulations permit the safety pilot to be the acting PIC as universally defined.
Airborne_Again wrote:
non-instructor pilot in the right seat … not trained … could very easily make things worse.
In a review of midair collisions in France during the period 1989–1999 BEA hypothesized that the mere presence of another pilot in non-commercial operations was a factor. Nine of those had an instructor on board. https://www.bea.aero/etudes/abordageseng/midair.htm
In seventeen planes involved there were two pilots on board. Excluding the three public transport planes where onboard tasks are evenly distributed between the crew members, it is possible to conclude that for other flights the vigilance of each pilot may have relaxed due to the presence of a second pilot, each pilot counting on the other’s hypothetical outside monitoring. … Flights with several pilots or instruction flights can cause a transfer of attentiveness towards the other pilot.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Maybe the real problem is that a pilot isn’t very dangerous after more than 90 days, so any system would “work”.
I think I am more dangerous if I haven’t flown in 90 days. I can notice some deterioration in performance after say two weeks. Three months is a long time.
