If I fly from airport A-B that is 500 miles away, that is CC. Now if I leave airport B and go to C that is only 15 miles away is that also CC because I am away from my home airport? Or is it not CC becuase it is less than 50 NM from my departure point?

Since I only stopped at C for fuel I logged A-B-C in my log book and logged it as CC. What if I would have stopped at B for say a day or so and then headed over to B (15 miles away)?

I am at work and don't have my FAR/AIM with me so thanks for any replies.

 

The answer lies in what you need X-C time for. As per definition both are loggable as x-c. Depending on you scenario I would log it like this.

Pre-Commercial License
I wouldn't log B-C as X-C because in order for X-C to count towards a rating you must travel to an airport >50nm. Logging everything as X-C might make it hard to figure out when you meet all the training requirements by you, your instructor, and more importantly the examiner come check-ride time.

Post-Commercial License
I would log everything to another airport as X-C to build towards the 500 X-C requirement of 135 IFR-PIC mins. At this point in my flying career I used a blank column and separated X-C >50nm for ATP requirements.

 

But if I left from A and only stopped at B for fuel enroute to C I think it would be CC because it was more than 50 miles from A which was the initial departure point.

Now if it was an extended stop at B then I see it becoming an issue.

 

Why should the amount of time you spend at airport "B" matter?

Look at the 2009 Van Zanen letter.

 

In theory it could but generally doesn't. What if he spent 2 weeks at "B" before continuing on to "C"?

AFAIK it has never gone as far as the Chief Counsel's office but the the orphaned and rejected Part 61 FAQ may be the "best" thing the FAA has ever said about what constitutes a single cross country "flight:"

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The 'original point of departure' does not change with a new day or delay
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To a large degree, what constitutes a single cross country flight is in the eye of the beholder, at least to the point where it becomes ridiculous. During an online discussion of the question, one person once said that he considers all of his flying to be one long cross country. That's a bit extreme but my guess is that so long as there is some reasonable basis for treating a flight with breaks as a single flight for cross country purposes it won't be questioned.

How long a break before it might be questioned? Beats me.

 

My exact point. If I am just stopping for fuel, food etc.... and continuing on to my destination, then I consider it one flight from the original point of departure. If I was stopping for say an overnight, then I would consider the next leg a completely different flight.

 

Your prerogative.

OTOH, if I were flying from, say, Denver to Phoenix for a business meeting and diverted to Albuquerque due to weather and stayed overnight, I'd still consider the Denver-Phoenix flight to be a single cross country flight for certificate requirement purposes.

 

Don't shoot me, but I'm pretty sure that this is going to depend on how you log it. If you're the type of guy that uses each line in your logbook for each one way flight, then no, that 15 mile trip would not count because you'd likely written it on a different line (after your 50 mile trip to airport B)

If you will log the entire trip on one line in your logbook, then I'd say that any flying that you do in the same aircraft on the same day, after you landed 50 miles away, is all going to count as Cross country time.

No examiner ever questioned me when I did the latter.

 

It has gone to the Chief Counsel's office and they have written several letters, the latest being the 2009 letter to Van Zanen.

 

The FAA has never seemed to care about how you log the different legs, but we were always vaguely concerned that they might start some day. That's why people would say to take a reasonable approach: touch-and-go? OK. Gas stop? OK Lunch stop? Probably OK. Ski weekend? Maybe not OK.

But the legal counsel letter mentioned above basically formalizes the "don't care how you log it" policy so the length of the stop does not seem to matter, it's all about how you log it.