"John Gaquin" wrote in message
...

"David Brooks" wrote in message
...
...Literally, it says you have to
consume the 2 hours traveling the 100 miles straight line, but in 2
hours
I
traveled the 40nm from TIW to PAE.

Seems to me that the expanded requirements for a Commercial certificate
address the likelihood that when paid to fly, you may well find yourself
flying some rather lengthy distance, with all the concomitant potential
for
compounding errors, etc.

It repeatedly amuses me how so many here will invest quantities of time in
figuring a way to meet the absolute minimum requirements of the FAR, while
never really leaving their familiar home territory.

If your objective is to enhance and expand your skills, for God's sake,
why
don't you take a real trip? Pick a destination where you might actually
have to refold your sectional enroute!! My God! Can you do that? :-)

Of course I can. It just so happens you can go from TIW to 4W6 with the
sectional tightly folded. And, yes, I see the smiley. And of course I have
traveled more than 100nm in a flight that lasted more than 2 hours - just
not with an instructor in a Commercial frame of mind.

Well, OK. I could have waited for the spring and droned along on Victor
airways precisely at my planned odd-500 altitude, followed the magenta line,
and, wow, figured out the landing pattern for a field somewhere down the
Oregon coast. What I did was learn a lot about not-terribly-low scud
running, with constantly shifting decisions about the best compromises for
altitude and direction, and how Victoria Terminal gets cut out by Lummi
Island when you have to go behind it, and how a 172's carb will ice up at
2400rpm. And I figured out the landing pattern for a field on the Canadian
border with trees at the south end.

So I think I packed a lot into those minimum requirements that might have
eluded me if I had merely gone for distance, no?

-- David Brooks