Insurance mandated 5 hours with an instructor when I got my Mooney. Should this have been logged as P1 or PUT? Just asking because I’m hoping to have all the IR training done by July-ish and I’m struggling to build up the required 50 hours x-country P1 time as I do the training.
Were you legal to fly as PIC when you did the hours from a regulatory point of view?
“P1” is a very old CAA (and possibly IAA?) term that doesn’t exist in the JAR and EASA systems, i.e. obsolete for 15 years now.
It must be logged as what you served as on those flights. What did you agree with the instructor before going out? There must be a clear definition before the flight…
I was legal, yes. There was no explicit agreement between us. I was just doing as the insurance asked. My logbook still has P1 defined in it.
If it is mandated as “dual time”, then it can only be logged as PUT.
If you are flying with an instructor then he is PIC.
FCL.010 the holder of an instructor certificate may log as PIC all flight time
during which he or she acts as an instructor in an aircraft;
If by virtue of not having the experience necessary to be insured as PIC, then you can’t be PIC until you fulfil that requirement.
The UK ANO Art 228 requires a pilot to log
(c) the capacity in which the holder acted in flight;
(d) information about any special conditions under which the flight was conducted, including night flying and instrument flying;
In this case the “special condition” is “dual time”
“P1” is not necessarily PIC. It is a term that was used on multi-pilot aircraft where there is a P2 and describes the seat position rather than the status of the person sitting in it.
Insurance will normally require you to have a rated pilot or instructor in the right seat rather than mandate instruction. Hence you may be able to log as PIC. Just because someone in the right seat is an instructor doesn’t make them PIC.
Tumbleweed wrote:
If by virtue of not having the experience necessary to be insured as PIC, then you can’t be PIC until you fulfil that requirement.
You can be insured as PIC with the company requiring mentor time for the first X hours. But you are still in charge.
This will depend entirely on what the insurance company required and whether you were legal to fly PIC absent the insurance requirement. What did your insurance certificate say exactly?
‘insured to be accompanied by a flight instructor for the first five hours’ is on the documents.
zuutroy wrote:
‘insured to be accompanied by a flight instructor for the first five hours’ is on the documents.
I would say you were PIC.
As said above – whether you were the PIC on these flights simply depends on whether you were the PIC. The PIC is who the operator, in this case you, says is the PIC.
So can you be the PIC on future flights? Of course.
Were you the PIC on past flights? Only you and the instructor know.
If you didn’t know for the past flights, that is not great from a safety point of view, it is quite important to be clear on who does what, and who is in command, when two pilots are up front, instructors or not.
From a logbook management point of view, you can of course log all this as PIC and if it later turns out that the instructor also logged this as PIC, he clearly was mistaken since YOU decide who the PIC is. [unless he did actually instruct you, in which case he’ll probably say “don’t be silly”]
I am no expert on regs but I recall that in FAA-land, one might log the whole of an ab-initio IR as PIC. Presumably the reasoning is that the actual conditions are usually (in IR training) VMC, and the FI’s presence ensures the flight itself is legal.
However in UK-CAA-land, every flight with an FI would have the FI as PIC and the other person as PU/T, even if the other person has all the papers required to fly it alone. This is also not right, but hey…
