Logging hours as instructor

[Sebbald]

Hello!

So everywhere I go I see people giving advice about going abroad to the US to get training and ratings, and then spending the time left on your visa to work as an instructor and build alot of hours.

My question is: can you actually log hours for yourself when you're just the instructor, and not the person that's actually flying the plane(the student)? My impression was that, apart from the bigger multi-crew aircraft that airlines operate, most aircraft were only single-pilot. Or is this some other type of flight time, as opposed to actually being the pic? In that case, are pic-hours worth more than instructor-hours from a potential employer's perspective?

I couldnt even find any good, concise, information about logging hours in general. Like how it's done practically and how it's controlled by the authorities.

[FlyingStone]

As an instructor you log PIC and Instructor hours (at least in JAA world). The most important thing when logging time is that it isn't important who operates the controls, but who makes critical decisions - and the latter is the PIC, regardless of where his/her hands and feet are. Or you can look it from a different perspective: since students log dual time in order to get the required total time for issue of PPL licence, somebody has to log PIC time for that flight - otherwise one might think that God or some higher force is the PIC :}