The only thing you can do is check the air navigation order for your own country that you intend to stay with.
A lot of this comes from the years when it was ex-mil pilots who were the ops inspectors and flight examiners in the UK. In the British Mil you only ever logged your flight time ie when the rubber wasn't touching the runway. So all this business of when the aircraft first moved for the intention of flight was consider to be a load of rubbish. So they basically said yes to pretty much anything to do with it as the only thing they considered worthy was time in the air. And they certainly didn't want people to get credit for sitting at the hold for 20mins.
These rules of thumb pretty much work for 99% of the time. As long as nobody really looks at what's going on from outside.
Tacho time is particularly dodgy as its actually an engine load function. Which some allow you to use for maintenance scheduling. You can alter it quite significantly if you know what you are doing.
For example when I was doing my hour building I to was billed and filled in the techlog using tacho as per the schools instructions. But I used to fly long sectors at just inside the green arc slowly which gave a tacho load of about 0.8 (it goes up to 1.4 at 100% rpm or something like that). When ever in the US I had a local log book as I was warned that some US instructors liked to write there days thoughts all over your log book which you had to use for the rest of your life. So I had my JAR logbook separate and logged the US stuff as the school wanted and let the instructor scribble all over it and then wrote my true hours up in the JAR log book and threw away the US one after I had no requirement to have the bi-annual sign-off. If I had logged it that way and the FAA instructors had seen it they would have had a hissy fit.
The one lad that stupidly got caught with two log books got told he was in breach of private flying rules because he was logging "free" hours and that was a benefit in kind. Which is of course rubbish because he paid for everyone of them it just it worked out that the rate was lower than the school was charging. They are really not happy either when they learn that there scribbles are getting consigned to the bucket.
But the JAR log book was chocks off to chocks on. Which meant I only paid for 80% of the hours logged. So was about 1500 USD saving on hour building.
Same with the others courses back in the UK. For the course hours the school agreed method was used along with payment. But the actual hours logged were chocks on to chocks off. Training out of an international airport this meant that I didn't have to hour build 6.5 hours to get 200 hours for license issue or start my FI course and also got me over the magic 50hours twin time.
So by logging the time as per the ANO and not the school method I saved paying extra on over 10% of the hours required for CPL/IR/MEP/FI coming out with 225hours TT and 51 hours MEP. So 5 hours of which was very expensive twin time. So a saving of 4000 USD.
So its actually in your own advantage to log the hours properly.
Last edited by mad_jock; 15th Dec 2013 at 07:21.