Bureaucracy gone mad

[Jenson Button]

Had a bit of a shock to the system to find that all P1 u/s hours in a multi crew aircraft need to be countersigned by the captain operating...in order to get unfrozen. Fortunately the company I work for can make arrangements to cover this in a letter to the Ministry at LGW. What happens if you have an electronic pilot log I asked..."Waste of time my dear chap, you will still need all P1 U/s hours signed off in hard copy...."

Has this been going for a while does anyone know ?

Jenson

[PENKO]

A letter from your base captain/chief pilot should suffice.

[Spitoon]

Not a pilot myself but I have to say this does sound a bit over the top. Is it just a UK thing or one of these harmonised European rules where we seem to have to pick the lowest/worst common denominator for anything and apply it everywhere?

[DB6]

It's bollocks, basically. Nobody fills in their logbook during flight and asks the captain to sign it before they go home and (in the UK anyway) the CAA knows this and takes the pragmatic approach, which is that a letter from your company verifying your P1/S hours is sufficient. I'm not even sure that's necessary in most cases, since JAR specifies 500 hours on multi-crew operations, so whether it's P1/S or P2 doesn't matter, unless you need P1/S time to satisfy some of the PIC requirements. Probably.

[A Very Civil Pilot]

When I unfroze my ATPL about 6 years ago, a letter from the CP was sufficient, as there were no counter-signatures in my log book.