Todd Pattist wrote
when two MEI's
take a 1-hour XC flight somewhere and each one comes back with a BFR
endorsement from the other, that's bull****, and we all know it.

And even this bull**** flight is not clearly a violation of
the FAR's.

OK, there's some grey area there. Sort of like that panel rebuild on
a logbook signature - every individual change could be considered
minor, so we'll consider the entire operation minor.

There's no clear requirement that I handle the
controls for more than 50% of the BFR flight time.. If the
instructor giving me a BFR wants to show me flight maneuvers
and then see me repeat them, he's free to do so. There's
no requirement as to how long the instructor can touch the
controls during my BFR, so this 50/50 one hour flight with
two cross-BFR's doesn't seem to me to be an unequivocal
violation of the FAR's

No, but it still totally fails to conform to the spirit of the
regulation. And that's why we have a FSDO deciding they're not going
to accept that. The guy who took an aerobatics course, however, is
just caught in the crossfire - he did conform to the spirit of the
regs.

Michael