"Richard Hertz" wrote
Oh man, here we go again. There is something wrong if you can't take off
with circling minimums, fly the entire flight in IMC and then land at
minimums.

Of course there's something wrong, and we all know what it is. We've
discussed it many times before.

The advice to start off and fly in good weather is BS - it is a crutch to
keep people who are not proficient (whether that means they didn't get
proper training to begin with or they have gotten "rusty" ) from killing
themselves and wrecking an airplane.

That's exactly right. Most people getting an instrument rating never
got the proper training to begin with. How could they? The absolute
minimum prerequisite to being a minimally competent instrument
instructor is being an experienced instrument pilot, yet the FAA
allows a pilot who has never (or only rarely) seen the inside of a
cloud to become an instrument instructor - and many do. As a result,
we're seeing masses of instrument pilots who are not ready to do
anything more than fly procedures under the hood, and are not prepared
to deal with real weather.

In theory flying under the hood should prepare them to fly IFR in IMC.
In theory, the difference between theory and practice is minimal -
but in practice it's not.

Buck's recommendations have nothing to do with the pilot's inability
to fly published procedures to minimums. Most newly rated instrument
pilots are entirely capable of flying a published procedure to
minimums. The recommendations are structured the way they are so that
the pilot can learn about the vagaries of weather - and not find
himself in a situation where both destination and alternate are below
mins or otherwise unlandable, or where the enroute weather has gone
ugly.

The typical newly minted intrument pilot has learned to control the
airplane by reference to instruments and follow published procedures.
He has had precious little exposure to real IFR weather, and probably
needs to ease into flying in it if he's not to be bitten by it. Sure,
this should have happened in training - but it probably didn't. Those
pilots who were properly trained are not asking these questions here -
they are out there flying in the weather.

Telling the average newly minted instrument pilot that he should be
taking off into a low overcast, flying for hours in the soup, and then
shooting an approach to mins is basically signing his death warrant.

Michael