The scenario is fairly straightforward.
Two private pilots both need to build cross-country time for their instrument ratings, so they come up with what sounds like a pretty good plan. Rent an airplane together, one person flies under the Foggles while the other acts as safety pilot, split the cost, and both log the flight. Half-price cross-country time. Except there’s a problem—it doesn’t work that way, and no, it’s not because I want to get more money from you as a customer.
There seems to be a lot of confusion between being able to log PIC time and being able to log cross-country time. They are not the same thing.
If two appropriately rated private pilots go flying and one pilot puts on the Foggles, the other pilot can serve as the required safety pilot. Depending on how the flight is conducted and who is acting as PIC, there are circumstances where both pilots can legally log pilot time during the simulated-instrument portion of the flight. That part is legitimate. The problem comes when the safety pilot also considers that time cross-country time. The FAA has addressed this issue directly. In the Glenn legal interpretation, the FAA made clear that simply being able to log PIC time as a safety pilot does not mean that pilot can also log the flight as cross-country time.
That distinction becomes particularly important for pilots working toward an instrument rating, where 14 CFR §61.65 requires 50 hours of cross-country flight time as pilot in command.
Consider two private pilots who each need 50 hours of qualifying cross-country time. They find an airplane that rents for $180 an hour and decide to build the time together. One flies under the Foggles, the other acts as safety pilot, and they split the rental cost. After 50 hours of flying, the airplane has cost $9,000. Each pilot has paid $4,500. It certainly feels like they have just built 50 hours of cross-country time for half price. Unfortunately they haven’t—the pilot conducting those qualifying cross-country flights may have accumulated 50 hours of cross-country PIC. The safety pilot may have accumulated a substantial amount of completely legitimate loggable pilot time, but that doesn’t give the safety pilot 50 hours of qualifying cross-country time.
If both pilots started the process needing 50 hours of cross-country PIC, the second pilot still has to go fly the cross-country experience he or she needs. Eventually the airplane has to fly those hours too. That is the part that gets lost when pilots talk about “splitting time.” You may be splitting the bill for a particular flight. You may both be logging legitimate pilot time. You may both be gaining valuable experience. But you haven’t taken one hour of required cross-country experience and turned it into two. If your objective was specifically to save money completing the 50-hour cross-country requirement, you haven’t really accomplished that.
Where the Real Savings Are
Flight training is expensive, so there is nothing wrong with trying to be smart about how you spend your money. In fact, students should be paying attention to it. But some of the best ways to save money in flight training have nothing to do with creative logbook entries. The single biggest thing most students can do is maximize the educational value of every hour they pay for.
Show Up Prepared
Read the material before the lesson. Understand the maneuver before your instructor demonstrates it. Chair fly. Know the checklist. Study the aircraft systems. Review the weather before you arrive. Know the airspace you’re going to operate in. Look at the lesson objectives ahead of time. Review what you struggled with during the previous flight. There is very little reason to spend $200 an hour learning something in an airplane that you could have learned sitting at your kitchen table. An airplane is an expensive classroom and, frankly, not a particularly good one. It’s noisy, moving quickly, and your attention is divided between flying the airplane, communicating, navigating, maintaining situational awareness, and soaking up everything else happening around you.
The airplane should be where you apply what you have already studied.
If I have to spend 10 minutes explaining a concept in the airplane that you could have learned on the ground beforehand, you’re paying airplane rates for a ground lesson. Do that enough times over the course of a private, instrument, or commercial certificate and it becomes real money.
Preparation makes expensive flight time productive.
Consistency matters for the same reason. Flying regularly means spending less time relearning skills from the previous lesson. Showing up on time matters. Having your weather, weight and balance, performance calculations, and planning completed before the engine starts matters. Knowing exactly what you are trying to accomplish on that flight matters. Saving $10 an hour on an airplane isn’t much of a bargain if poor preparation causes you to need another 10 hours of training. The objective shouldn’t simply be finding the cheapest hourly rate. It should be getting the greatest amount of education and experience out of every dollar you spend.
Not Every Flight Has To Save You Money
There is another side to this discussion that shouldn’t be ignored. Maximizing savings isn’t the end-all and be-all of flying. Go fly with another pilot. Split the airplane. Take turns under the Foggles. Fly somewhere for breakfast. Visit an airport you’ve never been to. Take a weekend trip. Fly to an airshow. Go somewhere for no better reason than you’ve never been there before. You might not have discovered a loophole that cuts the cost of your instrument rating in half; however, you might have discovered a great way to spend a Saturday.
Some of the greatest things aviation gives us don’t show up in a cost-per-hour calculation. Flying creates friendships, adventures, and experiences that can last considerably longer than whatever certificate or rating you were working toward at the time. Those things have value. They just don’t exist to cut the bottom line. There is an important difference between spending money efficiently and believing every flight has to be financially optimized. Sometimes the value of a flight is education. Sometimes it’s experience. Sometimes it’s proficiency. Sometimes it’s simply going somewhere with another pilot and having a good time. All of those are legitimate reasons to fly.
Be mindful of what flight training costs, but understand what actually saves money. Trying to manufacture the largest possible number of logbook hours for the smallest possible amount of money isn’t necessarily making you a better pilot, and sometimes, as with splitting cross-country time, it doesn’t even accomplish the financial objective you thought it did. The best opportunity to save money is usually sitting at home. Study. Read. Chair fly. Learn the systems. Understand the regulations. Prepare your flight planning. Review your mistakes. Know what you’re going to work on before you arrive at the airport. Then use the expensive airplane time to do the things that actually require an airplane.
If you maximize the educational value of every lesson and every flight, you’ll probably save considerably more money over the course of your training than you will chasing creative ways to split a Hobbs meter. At the same time, don’t reduce aviation to a spreadsheet. Fly with other pilots. Share expenses when it’s legal and makes sense. Build friendships. Go on adventures. Make memories. Fly somewhere simply because you can. Just understand the differences. Some flights save you money, some flights make you a better pilot, some flights give you an experience you’ll remember for the rest of your life. A really good flight might accomplish all three.
Jeze. Another commentary that doesn’t definitively answer the question the question that was originally asked. This is becoming a trend from this series. Please stay on topic, answer the question THEN go off on a tangent about maximizing learning during flight training. It would be real beneficial if a CFR was cited as well. Students are reading this hoping to learn something…
Hi Bryon,
The question was answered in the third paragraph. You can’t split cross country time. Clarified in the FAA letters Glenn (2009) and Gebhart (2009).
I will do my best to be more clear in the future, thanks for taking the time out of your day to read and engage.
Have a great day!
Doug,
Thank you for the article update. This allows me to further understand where the answer comes from and gives the big picture. Appreciate the work.
Read the hyperlink’d “Glenn legal interpretation” (highlighted in green) Doug provided, Byron, which he then summarized.
Nevertheless, there is still great value in splitting hood time during instrument training. You won’t be able to “double-dip” the time, but there’s a lot to be said for going up with a fellow instrument trainee between instrument training flights. You can practice the skills you learned in the last lesson as well as observe your training partner’s performance and gain insights into what’s happening while they fly. This is how my training partner and I completed our instrument rating training with the minimum 40 hours of instrument time and only an hour or two more than the minimum 15 hours of instrument training time each compared to a more typical 25-30 hours of time with an instrument instructor.