Jim Burns wrote:
The "he was a passenger" is a cop out. If you are a pilot, even a student
pilot with only 30 hours, and you are in the airplane, why wouldn't you do
everything you could to be prepared?? which to me starts at home with
flight planning.

I can see by this and your other post that you expect the student
pilot passenger to act more like a student than a passenger. That's
your perogative. Not being an instructor, I don't generally take that
approach. I don't insist that a student pilot riding with me do any
flight planning or learn anything at all. I'm not an instructor and
I'm not there to teach them anything. If they happen to learn
something on the flight, good for them. But I certainly wouldn't (as a
non-CFI) insist that any student that goes for a ride with me do
detailed flight planning or anything else. If they choose to do so,
that's fine, but when it comes right down to it, I'm the PIC and they
are just a passenger. I can provide them with some practical
experience, and they can take what they can from that, but I'm not
going to pretend to be their instructor.

At 30 hours, I would expect that the student pilot/passenger had completed
at least part of his cross country training, so I'd expect that if he had
agreed to do the hands on flying through that type of airspace that he would
take the effort to flight plan it also.
snip

If your assumptions are correct, perhaps you have a point. But
neither you nor I know what kind of 30 hr. student we're talking about.
There's the 30 hr. student that's flying solo X/C and there's the one
who flies once a month and hasn't soloed yet (i.e. clueless newbie).
The latter may not even be at the level of competently planning a
flight of this distance. I'm not going to judge him without more info.

John Galban=====N4BQ (PA28-180)