Another one:
You can't fly from the right seat if you're not a FI or have taken a right seat course.
You can't fly from the right seat if you're not a FI or have taken a right seat course.
Do you mean you can't because you are not able to or because you are not allowed to? The latter may be the case! At work on muti-crew aircraft, I need to do a checkide from the right seat once per year (additionally to my two left side checkrides) in order to be allowed to occupy the right seat during flight. Without this checkride, I wouldn't even be allowed to sit on the right as pilot monitoring.
You can't fly from the right seat if you're not a FI or have taken a right seat course.
In our typical GA aircraft, the pilot on command is required to sit on the left seat unless it is instruction. While you can fly from the right seat (my 3 year old likes to do that), you cannot be PIC.
I don't think that is the case.
As I understand it, the rules for single-pilot light GA aircraft are simply "one qualified pilot to remain at the controls throughout the flight".
Show me the rule that says the commander has to sit in the left seat.
Of course, a club or flying school renting aeroplanes may mandate the commander in the left seat, but those are terms of business rather than aviation regulations.
I have sat in the left seat while someone else (not an instructor) is the commander in the right seat. Equally, I have been the commander whilst in the right seat and I'm not an instructor.
I'm the same as Graham, I wasn't aware this was a problem. Say on a 2 hour trip round the coast or something, where we haven't done a land away, I might do an hour from the right hand seat to split the cost and put the time in the logbook. Obviously at this point the other pilot in the left seat is not logging the time. What we do to mitigate a problem is of course only fly from the right when the left hand seat person is qualified and insured to fly the aircraft, and in the event of an emergency or entering IMC, then the left hand seat pilot takes control.
I wasn't aware this was a problem.
That's one of those "there is no problem as long as all goes well" problems. As long as you and your buddy are good friends and everything is fine, everything is going to be fine. But if you bend your buddys aeroplane by landing hard due to the unusual position of the controls (*) and it comes down to the question whether you have to sell your house to pay for the damage or he has to sell his, he will most probably not be your best friend for much longer. Nor will the insurance broker who made such a happy face when he sold him the hull loss insurance.
(*) A buddy of mine once trained for a conversion to a touring motor glider. He had quite some experience on C172 and C182 before. When he was instructed to do a very low go-around, he pushed forward hard with his right hand as he was used to. Only that here, his right hand was holding the stick and the left hand the throttle (that he probably pulled back, but he can't remember). Luckyily, no one was injured, but the motor glider was totalled. As it was a training flight with an instructor, they had no insurance trouble either.
In a single pilot aircraft, whose POH has no limitations on the PIC seat, surely the PIC can be in either seat.
Swapping PIC authority while airborne is also not illegal AFAIK. It was often done when training in N-reg planes, by an instructor who was being paid but who did not have a JAA CPL... he would fly as a passenger up to the UK FIR boundary and the official training would start there.
I could be wrong but there is no law saying that a PIC has to start on the ground.
Obviously there are insurance issues. For example many PPL flights have been done with an IR holder as a passenger in the RHS, in case the flight had to enter IMC, but that RHS person would in most cases not be insured for that aircraft. That is just asking for trouble.
In a single pilot aircraft, whose POH has no limitations on the PIC seat, surely the PIC can be in either seat.
Maybe that's different in other countries, but german law has its own point of view on that. My abbreviated transaltion from Luftverkehrsordnung (similar to the ANO in the UK) paragraph 2: "If the POH of the aircraft does not specify the seat of the pilot in command then ... with aircraft, powered gliders and gliders with side-by-side seat configuration, the left hand seat is the seat of the PIC."
Which legally translates to: In case something should happen, the guy who occupied the left seat will be paying the bills. If he happens to satisfy the conditions of the insurer, then the insurer will pay for him. Who was actually handling the controls/flying the aircraft does not matter!
"If the POH of the aircraft does not specify the seat of the pilot in command then ... with aircraft, powered gliders and gliders with side-by-side seat configuration, the left hand seat is the seat of the PIC."
That can't be the case for a G-reg (as stated) because any instructor in a G-reg (training towards JAA papers... let's keep this simple for now) is automatically PIC, even if the LHS occupant has sufficient papers to be PIC on that specific flight and flight conditions.
And I am sure German instructors sit in the RHS too. How does a German ab initio PPL student log the flight?
... instructor ...
The paragraph from which I quoted above is much longer and of course also covers instruction and check flights!
