AirBaker said:
- Lets assume that you have only flown a 152. The FAA doesn't mind that you go and fly a 172, Archer, or any other fixed tricycle gear, non HP, non complex, aircraft. You might not be covered by insurance, but you do have the license to fly that aircraft. So you don't need to be approved by the insurance company to fly.
Right -- you need the category/class and and, if applicable, ATE's/type rating to be the PIC of an aircraft, and from an FAA view, if you've got 'em, you've got 'em.
- Whether or not you can log time is always somewhat a grey area.
Logging time is very black and white once you read 14 CFR 61.51 carefully, and combine with it the official FAA Chief Counsel-approved definition of "rated": having the applicable category, class, and (if required) type ratings on one's pilot certificate (and ONLY that -- no ATE's needed to be "rated").
You can't really log the time if you're not endorsed in the aircraft.
If you mean you can't log time in an aircraft for which you do not have the applicable 61.31 ATE's, that's just not true, and it's been specifically addressed by the FAA Chief Counsel's office. If you are "rated" and the sole manipulator of the controls, you can log it as PIC time. If you are rated and the SIC safety pilot under 14 CFR 91.109(b), you can log it as SIC time. Note that in the sole manipulator case, someone who DOES have the ATE's and is current and qualified to be PIC must be there acting as PIC while you fly the plane.
But I've known more than a few people who in fact did retroactively log hours after they've been endorsed. Legal issues? who knows.
If they were the sole manipulator of an aircraft for which they were rated, it was legal for them to log the time before they got the ATE, and they need not have waited to make this perfectly legal entry. However, making a series of LATE entries out of sequence is going to raise FAA eyebrows with suspicions of making up time that wasn't really flown.
- If you do retroactively log the hours, did you really get the experience from those hours you think you did? In other words, I wouldn't log 50hrs of Bonanza time if I had yet to really fly the airplane.
You only get to log the PIC time under the sole manipulator clause (61.51(e)(1)(i)) if you actually flew the plane while you were "rated", although someone else properly PIC-qualified and current may have been the legal PIC at the time.
I don't think there is a problem with adding it to your total time though. You just couldn't log 'High Performance' hours.
Assuming you were "rated" at the time of the flight, there would be no problem logging this "hands-on-stick-and-throttle" time to your PIC, total flight, and total pilot columns. And since 61.51 does not address "High Performance" time, and nowhere in Part 61 is there any requirement for "High Performance" time, the FAA won't care about that column if you so create one.