I agree, a lot of what the FAA says is not very clear. But if the company assigns a SIC to a flight for convenience, say to help with the loading of cargo, and was operating under the autopilot in place of a SIC Ops Spec the SIC would not be able to log that flight. Nichols says the operator could decide not to use the autopilot and then the SIC would be required and therefore able to log the time. So I'll stand by my statement that the SIC must be required by TDC or the regs the flight is being operated under in order for them to log the time.