In article ,
says...


1) No Single-Pilot, single engine IFR in IMC at night

I agree that single-pilot IFR is hard, and doing it at night is harder, but
I don't see the single-engine connection. If the fear is not being able to
find an emergency landing spot, then the rule should be "No single-engine
at night". If the fear is pilot task overload, then the rule should be "no
single-pilot IMC at night".

Perhaps he means if you lose your power and control your descent rate only to
break out at 500AGL, you don't have time to look for a landing spot. In night
VFR, you will usually be contact with greater reserves, sometimes with a
moon, and generally have much greater margins to deal with this. The
work overload factor may enter into his reasoning here as well, though I
connot speak for him.


2) No S-P Multi-engine IFR with MEA's higher than the aircraft's SE
performance

Again, I don't see the connection here. Presumably this means it's OK to
fly single-pilot, single-engine IFR at those same altitudes?


I'm somewhat with you on this. It seems that a lot of ME rules tend to hold
ME operations to a standard we were simply willing to wash over in SE ops.
But then, the whole multi-engine equation is skewed anyway - Collins has
shown us that a power loss in a ME environment is statistically more
dangerous than the same thing in a sigle - which blows the whole ME reasoning
apart at the seams.

There seems to be a committment level involmved in ME ops - at least in light
twins, with marginal SE performance. If the pilot does everything right, the
second engine is a life saver in case of a power failure. Since we know that
most of the time (something like 80%) the pilot fails to maintain these
standards, the ME environment becomes more dangerous than the single would
have been with the same engine failure. Even a bad landing in a field is
often survivable, while a loss of control SE in a twin is usually not. So we
all have to assume we're among the 20% who are going to get it right!

Some countries do not allow IFR at night in SE aircraft. The way the
statistics point, you could almost argue they should not allow Multi-IFR at
night - or at least require certain SE performance standards (much better
than most light twins) for multi-IFR, day or night.

G Faris