Bob Moore wrote:

I'll tell you why Jon....As a 20,000+ hour former navy and retired
airline pilot who served as an instrument instructor in both services,
and has been an FAA authorized instrument instructor for 35 years...
I'm in charge of the training session...not ATC.
snip

Bob, with all due respect to your very impressive background (seriously), I
wanted to ask you to comment on something you didn't mention at all: How
flying in actual conditions differs from flying under a hood to a new
instrument student.

As a March '03 instrument rated pilot, I had the advantage of training in
a lot of actual instrument conditions. ATC at out class C approach
facility (Syracuse, NY) was *very* accommodating to my instructor's
requests while I practiced numerous holds, DME arcs, and published
approaches. Granted I never created a separation issue for ATC, so I
suppose my take on this might be skewed.

The point I wanted to make was that to me there was a big mental and
physiological difference between flying under the hood and flying in actual
conditions, thanks to how the "actual" clouds and precipitation tricked my
direct and peripheral vision.

Not *once* under the hood did I get spatially disoriented, most likely
because no matter how good the hood was at blocking the view, there was
always some type of peripheral clue that aided my spatial orientation.
The first few times in actual, though, I experienced a low-to-moderate case
of the leans. Those experiences and how I responded to them really helped
my confidence in actual from that point forward.

I can certainly appreciate the flexibility you as an instructor have when
you are VFR. But reading this and the IFR group over the last few years I
have seen more than a few threads where pilots who received their
instrument rating with little to no actual time immediately need to employ
a CFII to take them into the clouds. IMO this seems like a failing of
their instrument training.

From my very small corner of the world, I believe instrument students would
benefit tremendously from several hours of actual time, despite the fact
that the instructor doesn't have *as much* flexibility.

--
Peter







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