I still find it hard to believe this debate hasn't ended. I think the instructors and fto's have a share of the blame for the lack of clarity in this situation. I have always understood p1s to be on sucessfull completion of a flight test however when I spoke to a lady at the licencing dept at the caa regarding my case after listening patiently and appearing to go off to check with one of her colleagues. She came back and said in her exact words YOU CAN LOG IT AS P1 AS LONG AS THE CROSS CHANNEL CHECK WAS SATISFACTORY!
This seems to make sense while it is also a con on behalf of some fto's. I personally have friends who have thier own aircraft and have no problems flying to France , Spain and Portugal whithout doing any checkouts.
Several times during my training some instructor told me to log p1s for a 45 day check and some told me to log put. As I did a couple of these while I was doing my atpl ground school and wasn't flying often. It is not uncommon to see instuctors at the fto I attended arguing about the rules amongst themselves. I think it will help if the fto's have a procedure similar to sop's in airline whereby the rules are clearly stated. If you are going to do a cross channel check it will be logged as put for the student and the instuctor p1.
While this sounds daft as all the instuctor did was show us the directions from letouqet airport to the town center which I could have done by myself had he not been there. Or better still the caa should come up with a way of logging something like this. The flight was only one hour and ten minutes and by the way before I sent my log book off to the caa I had 102.5 hours (2.5hrs over the required 100)just in case this particular flight was not accepted as p1.