Hurrah for BEagle and Genghis the Engineer! As I was reading down this thread I was starting to get a bit concerned that the general concensus was that your main objective on a cross country should be to get the right signatures in the right places on the form!
My view is, was, and always will be that we should always commit aviation SAFELY. If getting your personal skills to a safe level can be achieved without failing at any stage, then all well and good. However, this isn't an ideal world, and we all make mistakes at some point in our flying lives. The trick is in recognising that we are fallible, and then doing somethinbg about it, in order to become better, SAFER pilots.
I'm sure we all strive to improve, and I'm also sure that everyone on here who has any degree of experience, be it me with my paltry 70 hours or someone else with 10,000 hours over many years, would all endorse that. Let's face it, any pilot who DOESN'T try to improve their airmanship skills quite frankly shouldn't be up there at all.
So to go back to the original question, yes, you can fail a cross country. And that's the way it should be. Compromising on personal standards compromises on safety. And THAT can kill.
Right, rant over. Climbing back down from soapbox. <img src="smile.gif" border="0">