There's something I'm wondering about here. Back in pre-JAR days when I did my PPL(A), the QXC was much shorter, 100 nm I think. People didn't worry about it too much, most of us enjoyed it (I loved mine!), and to my knowledge very few people screwed up. Now it's 150nm isn't it? That's a really long flight for most low hours pilots. An instructor friend of mine says many of her students really worry about doing it; people on PPRuNe do too, and I'm sure I would have at the same stage. Now we all know that stress coupled with fatigue makes it harder for people to cope with a workload they could probably manage otherwise. Plus, on a long flight, the wx etc is more likely to change, increasing the workload at just the time you really don't need it. Now in those sort of situations you don't have enough spare capacity to know you're stressed; you usually think you're doing OK; you just do silly things like landing on wrong runways or mixing up radio calls - things you'd cope with perfectly well under normal circumstances (I speak from bitter experience here <img src="eek.gif" border="0"> ). So what I'm wondering is, is the current QXC just too long? And is that why people are making errors, rather than that they haven't been taught properly? Is it that they need more experience, rather than more training? And you can get that experience post-PPL, preferably gradually and safely. You can't hurry where flying's concerned; it doesn't work (again, I found that out the hard way).
Anyway, I'd be interested to hear what other people think.