"David Brooks" wrote in message
...
Saturday afternoon I met my new instructor; Plan A was to do the day and
night VFR duals back to back, and plan B was just to do the day. Due to
the
interesting weather, we came up with this: Paine to Tacoma (repositioning
flight), start the clock and a new line in the logbook, Tacoma to Blaine
(103nm), back to Paine (2.2 hours from Tacoma to Paine).

Do you mean to do the PAE-TIW-Blaine-PAE flight twice, once for each of the
day and night requirements? Or are you expecting that doing it once will
satisfy both? If the latter, I think you're mistaken.

If the former, seems to me that as long as you make sure that the
TIW-Blaine-PAE portion of the flight is 2 hours, then you can call the TIW
point of departure your "original" point of departure and you're fine.
Otherwise, I don't think the flight would qualify, since you never wind up
100 NM from PAE (which would otherwise be your "original" point of
departure).

If you wanted to fly VERY slowly, you could fly PAE-TIW-Blaine-TIW-PAE,
using each leg between TIW and Blaine for the actual XC. Or fly kind of
slow and add another stop, like Port Angeles.

All that said, seems to me that if you're reasonably patient, a plain
vanilla PAE-PDX-PAE flight would work fine. You'd only need ceilings in the
neighborhood of 6000-10000' for that to be practical, which we'll get at
some point. You just need a small break in the weather, with a warm front
after to keep the clouds ahead of the front up high. All that water between
TIW and Blaine is good for allowing you to fly low, but it's not so good in
terms of random fog and low-level clouds.

Did anyone else do a 2-leg flight like that for the Commercial VFR, and
was
it OK with the examiner?

Can you be more specific? When you say "for the Commercial VFR", do you
mean for one or the other of the day and night requirements, or do you mean
for both of them together?

Pete