Todd Pattist wrote
but it still totally fails to conform to the spirit of the
regulation.

Exactly. It's clearly a violation if they came back after a
half hour, but when each pilot clearly flew with a CFI for
an hour, and met all the explicit regs, I'd want the FSDO to
keep its "spirit of the rule" and regional interpretations
to itself.

Now recall what I said: There are plenty of people out there who try
to abuse the system and inspectors who try to curtail the abuse -
generally in a manner that is ineffective, illegal, and incompetent.
This is exactly the situation here.

I happen to agree with you - I also want to limit the authority of the
FSDO inspectors to enforcement of the explicit regs, and I want the
FSDO inspectors to keep their "spirit of the rule" and regional
interpretations to themselves. But what is the underlying assumption
here? Let's be honest about it - the FSDO inspectors are using their
best judgment. What we're saying is that their judgment is so poor
that we don't want them using it. Kind of a sad state of affairs,
isn't it?

Michael