Originally Posted by
JetDoc
Not to mention the difficulty flight instructors have building 50 nm cross country time when we actually do have students. I kinda giggled when I read the section about flight instructors in the pipeline. While it is quite easy to amass 1500 hours total time teaching, cross country time is another story with only 4-5 hours per student that's over 100 students. In the 3 1/2 years I've been teaching I've built over 1600 total, meet all the other ATP mins but only have 245 hours of 50 nm straight line cross country time.... So in the mean time I suppose I will continue to teach stalls, DME arcs and learn to find an airport that is more than 50 miles away because apparently I need 255 more hours to do it correctly or hope that more reasonable heads will prevail before I reach age 65....

Don't disregard that requirement for CC time. Take a flight across a couple weather systems and you will learn more about flying in that 20hrs than you did in the last 300hrs of locals.