I picked up a freeby pilot magazine ('Go Flying', my favourite magazine for adjusting wonky table legs and catching crumbs when eating cakes) at the flying club yesterday and read Pablo Mason's column with some suspicion.
He writes:
If you're hiring a 152, fly with another pilot. Give the controls to the right seat pilot and you can both log the hours as P1.
This is absolutely incorrect, isn't it. In an aeroplane cerificated for single pilot operations, one person is P1, the other is a passenger and nothing more. Not P1, not P2, just pax.
Logging hours as P1 of aeroplanes is a matter quite close to my heart at the moment, but I make sure that I am squeaky clean and my logbook experience is absolutely bona fide and legal. It is quite frustrating to hear of others logging all sorts of dodgy hours and a 'celeb pilot' like Pablo giving this sort of advice can only make the matters worse, disadvantaging those who stay within the letter of LASORS.
Already on another forum I am reading this sort of thing:
In the current Go Flying magazine Pablo Mason suggests that both pilots can log P1 hours when flying together. How does this work? At present we fly together and take it in turns to log P1 with the other flying P2. Obviously if we can both log P1 it will double our hours
Oh dear!
Of course, PM may have meant 'each log P1 for half the time' but that's not how it reads.