If, somewhere in your flight you take off from A and land at B it's cross
country. If somewhere in your flight you take off from A and somewhere in that
same flight you land at B where B is more than 50 nm away from A, then the
flight is cross country which can be counted towards most ratings that require
it. (the 50nm thing).

The flight can occur over several days. A and B do not have to be the
beginning and end of your flight. Stuff can happen before, between, and after
A and B. The whole flight is still cross country.

The thing hinges on what you call a "flight", and it's your call. There is
room for reasonable differences in what you might want to call a flight, and
what I might want to call a flight, but the regs accomodate both.

In fact (as far as I can tell) you can log an entire ordinary month's worth of
air time as a single flight, and if ever you landed more than 50nm from any
place you took off from, you can log the entire thing as cross country. Now
this much of a stretch might raise the eyebrows of the FAA (and eventually
prompt more rulemaking), but nothing in the regs that I'm aware of would
prevent the flight from being used as XC for ratings. It might even be quite
reasonable (say, you took a month to travel from Bangor Maine to San Diego
California, and did it in short hops, including some barnstorming, over the
course of a month).

You don't even have to log consistently. For example, some out and back
flights I log as one flight, some I log as two. (logging them as two, if one
leg is all night, makes it easier to infer a night takeoff - aside - the FAA
requires night takeoffs for currency, but most logbooks don't provide a column
for takeoffs, though they provide one for landings, though they don't provide
one for night landings...)

Jose

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