I firmly belive that we make time for whatever we deem important.
Since you already had prior training, you probably can finish it up in
a week of accelerated training. If you counted the vacation days that
you took per year since starting the hotel business, you probably ended
up with at least two weeks/year. Substracting one week for the sacred
Osh trip, this still leaves you with one week for the training.
Precisely.
If we felt a burning need to get the rating, I would sacrifice going to
our daughters' volleyball games, or my son's wrestling meets, or going
out to dinner with fly-in guests, or holding Tuesday Movie Night, or
chairing Friends of Iowa City Airport, or being our airport's AOPA
Support Network volunteer, or organizing fly-outs, or working on the
history of the Iowa City airport, or...
At the moment, our life is full to bursting, and it's wonderful! The
instrument rating will simply have to wait for that idyllic (mythic?)
time when I've got nothing better to do.
If the trips are important then even one is too many. You may want
to consider the VFR trips in marginal weather as well.
Just an aside: I failed to mention in my original response that there
are many times we would scrub flights here, whether we were VFR *or*
IFR, even if the conditions were relatively benign-looking IFR. For
example, there are plenty of days here when the sky conditions are
relatively "soft" IFR, but the wind is howling at 20 - 30 knots. We
would not fly in those conditions, period, not because it's unsafe but
because it's awful to fly a light plane in turbulence -- especially
without a defined horizon.
Again, this is a product of our equipment, not our ratings. Even with
Atlas' (relatively) heavy wing loading, the experience of flying inside
a popcorn popper is not one we wish to do again.
But you don't just fly in the Midwest. It seemed that your family
had taken quite a few cross country trips.
True enough.
Don't get me wrong, there are times when the IR would have made a trip
or three easier.
3. Instrument Flying Sucks. This is something I've rarely seen
discussed here (maybe never?), but instrument flying is one of the most
boring things I've done.
It sucks because you had only experienced IFR flying in training.
Mostly, but not entirely, true. I've gone on several long trips in
light GA aircraft that have included actual instrument conditions (when
I was not PIC, obviously). In each case, the instrument portions of
the flights were either stultifyingly boring, risky beyond anything I
would ever attempt (rated or not), or physically uncomfortable due to
turbulence.
Now, in the end, we *were* able to make it to destinations in a
timeframe that would have been impossible to achieve without the IR, so
some would say that makes it all worthwhile.
In our short 5 years of flying, we had enjoyed many beautiful
sceneries, sunrises, sunsets, breathtaking mountains, valleys, lakes
etc. in all seasons but many of our most memorable experience were in
IFR flying. They were like religious experience. You fell closer to
God while dancing among the clouds with angels. A recent experience
was our camping trip to Mt. Washington Regional Airport in Whitefield,
NH. We were in the clouds in light rain. Getting near the airport, we
descended, popped out of the cloud and was rewarded with a Kodak moment
of a beautiful rainbow over the field.
http://tinyurl.com/h54vm
That's beautiful, Hai. Thanks for sharing it.
In closing, getting the rating has long been a goal of mine,
Just do it, Jay. You will find that the rating is a heck more useful
and IFR flying a lot more fun that you thought.
Someday.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"