I don't get why students and instructors are so bent on doing the absolute minimums for cross countries. Oh, here's an airport 50.000001 away. That's the one we'll do! A student comes to me with something like that, and I'm like "nope, try again, I want full assery not half assery!"
I wouldn't let a student get away with 50.0001 NM away either more so because its in that "fungible" distance and it will ultimately depend on how accurately you are able to measure the distance to between the airports (and just what point on the sectional/airport you use to measure the distance).
That being said, the urge for shorter cross countries is usually motivated by time, money and need.
Time: The average training aircraft True's at somewhere between 90-110 TAS... At that speed, its barely better than a car, especially since most early cross countries have a tendency to follow major highways... Sure I've had favorable windshear conditions that let me fly faster in both directions but I've also had unfavorable winds where the cars on the ground were moving faster than I was. Longer cross countries there for take more time and time is a valuable commodity to most people.
Money: Intricately tied to time is the money factor. Cost played a big factor in my cross country's early in my flight training... Cost of my time, cost of the airplane and the cost overall of obtaining my license. A longer cross country takes more flight time to complete in a trainer. That's an added cost which then gets compounded into the cost of the license; doubly so if you have to fly it with an instructor (such as any of the 2 XC's requiring an instructor or the long XC which permits an instructor, all 3 for commercial or just an initial cross country).
Need: When I first got my PPL in San Antonio, TX, there just wasn't anywhere I was interested in going or needed to go to in a reasonable range. Driving to Austin was faster than driving to the airport, preflighting and flying. Houston and Dallas wouldn't be bad options but as a student pilot, it'd pretty much have to be an out and back and even as a PPL, there just wasn't anything of interest in either city to me. Going further out pretty much assures the need to stay overnight which becomes a cost issue again with overnight minimums on the plane, tie down costs and hotels. When I moved to California, it was a little different as suddenly flying beat traffic. Now back in the North East, I'm back to not really wanting to go to any of the mid-range airports but not having a plane fast enough or cheap enough in terms of minimum overnight hours to fly to a longer range location; plus its not only difficult to do but I always feel bad taking the plane for the entire day and not letting others get their flights in. (I know I need my own plane but most students aren't even considering their own plane let alone have one so need is a big consideration).
Combining need with the time and money aspect and well you have a recipe for short XC's born out of the desire to have the time and money count towards something... Most of my early XC's I did were short 51-60NM XC's out of a need to get "value" out of the time and money spent.
Which value in this case was generally born out of the need to meet a requirement for a license. All of which makes its easy to see why a minimum requirement XC is generally preferable to an "exceeds" requirement XC when flying for requirement... especially since the PPL only requires 5 hours of solo XC time and 3 hours of Dual XC time... Times which are generally met pretty easily just by doing the initial day XC and the night XC's for the dual and the 150NM XC + a second XC for the solo.
Maybe a solution is to extend the number of solo XC hours required? I know I didn't particularly like having to go through the process of getting my XC plan validated by a CFI when I did my PPL so if I needed more than 5 hours, I probably would have done longer XC's than I did in order to minimize the number of flights I did but I imagine there will be some people who have no problem flying 5 or 6 XC's to get the time required and they may even fly the same XC more than once which has a diminishing return on experience.
I also know that a lot of instructors get leery of releasing their students for longer XC's. Weather conditions can change, planes can break down further away and the student can have an accident/incident or violate an FAR which goes against the instructor. One of the issues with holding instructors responsible/accountable for their student's actions; tis better to get the XC over with quickly and in the minimum time/distance required so they can get their checkride down and become responsible/accountable for themselves than risk them doing something that goes against your certificate.
Agree 100%. Why people want to do bare minimum when this is training. I have students Xc around 75 miles each way and the long xc around 200 to 250. I want my students to be able to handle a lot more possible situations when they get the license than students that have done the bare minimum.
Distance isn't really a big deal honestly. My favorite and most frequently logged destination was a cross country of 60 NM. Though it was my favorite for other reasons, I found not only was I intimately familiar with the route but it required practically zero skill in navigation to get there and getting back required only a little more skill... Catalina Airport (AVX) on Catalina island lies 59.5NM from Carlsbad airport (CRQ) in California. You take off from Carlsbad, a class D airport who's most frequently used runway faces west, fly runway heading to the coast which is just to the west of the airport and just on the edge of the class D airspace and usually by then on a day with the generally available conditions and even the minimum conditions required to complete the flight, you'd be at an altitude to high enough to spot the island... Point the nose and go. Once to the island, the airport is practically smack dab in the center of it and even if you didn't know that, the island is only 7 NM wide and 17NM long.
Coming back from there wasn't that much more difficult... Day or night. The airport is at 1600 ft and by the time you made the 180 to go east and reached the town of Avalon, you had enough altitude to see the mainland which was again point and go... The hardest part with the return was knowing a heading that would get you reasonably close to CRQ and keeping out of the Bravo's of LAX and SAN to the North and South or the Restricted area over Camp Pendleton... but even that was pretty simple since Camp Pendleton is basically a giant no-man's land along the coast between Oceanside/Carlsbad and Irving/Anheim/Los Angeles. Shoot for where "civilization" begins again on the south side of Pendleton and you'd be 10NM from the airport.
Of course that was only 60NM but then I can look at my 261NM leg of my long cross country for commercial and still question just how much "skill" I demonstrated on that leg... I left 3O8 Harris Ranch in the Central California Valley headed south. To the east and west were mountains leading me to the southern tip of the valley so it was a pretty easy climb and heading even without having a VOR station to tune to or a mountain to target. Just a point and in the right general direction and let the mountains do the rest. I climbed to 11,000 ft to get over the mountains and into the LA Basin where things became even easier... At 11,000 ft, its remarkably easy to see the coast even 20NM inland but even without the coast which I was able to follow all the way back to San Diego, I also had SoCal talking in my ear more or less giving me directions to keep out of the way of the traffic in the Bravo over LAX and SAN. Technically of course it was all pilotage but not in the way that I did pilotage flying even 50NM in Texas where your landmarks/points and headings/tracks actually mattered because everything looked the same.
Of course the hardest part of my long cross country and the hardest cross country I've done to date was the 54.8NM (direct, I didn't go direct for performance reasons) between Lone Pine (O26) and Eckert (1Q1), neither of which I actually landed at but easily could have been landing points as landmarks along a longer cross country (from L06 to 3O8). Over the Sierra Nevada's, with hardly any good landmarks and certainly no roads, clearways or other man-made objects to follow, too far to be heard by Joshua Approach and too low at 10,500 ft to pickup Oakland Center picking my way through mountains at mostly 9-10,000 ft but some extending up to nearly 13,000 feet partially or fully obscured in places by a large orographic cloud that extended up to 13,000ft or more and required knowledge of where to find some additional lift and every ounce of performance out of the Grumman Tiger I was in to reach and exceed its service ceiling of 13,800 ft while circling in the mountains for nearly 30 minutes to barely (and maybe even not completely, though considering the terrain I thankfully didnt have to worry about an IFR plane popping out of the clouds from below) fly over the clouds legally. By the time I got up to enough altitude to reach Oakland Center, they were trying to find a plane in the area that could deviate to try and relay the signal. All in a plane without GPS and a poorly functioning VOR.
So yeah... 260 NM vs 54 NM... you can get a lot of experience in 50 NM or very little experience in 260 NM (especially if you have a moving map GPS plane).
