"Peter Duniho" wrote in message
...
"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.

I meant to imply that we settled for the day VFR only. We landed before
civil dusk. Trying to make the same mileage satisfy both would be bending
the regs to beyond the breaking point.

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.

That's what I was saying. Blaine is 4W6 incidentally (Seattle Approach had
to ask). With a long enough final your base leg is in Canada and, yes, I had
been talking to Victoria Terminal.

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.

As it turns out, Kelso (KLS) is far enough. It depends whether you just just
want to put the qualifying flight in your logbook, or actually learn
something (say, how to operate in a busy Class C).

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.

That was part of the point. The instructor recently left NAS Whidbey, so he
knew the terrain well. It was a good exercise in conditions that you
probably wouldn't refuse to your employer (which is a purely theoretical
entity in my case).

-- David Brooks