Motion is so unreliable that I wonder why anyone would try to integrate it
except under very specific circumstances.

Except it's not. The simple act of braking a car for a light depends
highly on the sense of motion, and humans manage that feat hundreds of
millions of times a day with a relatively low failure rate. Flaring
an aircraft on landing on the other hand is almost entirely dependent
on sense of motion. Sense of motion can be tremendously powerful, as
long as you understand how it can also be fallible.

To Fly IFR, you must be able to already fly VFR, to fly VFR, you must
master an understanding of how the aircraft moves, and how those
movements feel.

Why? Autopilots fly IFR without any sensation of how the aircraft is moving,
and without visual cues.

We are not autopilots, we are human beings. Human beings do not have
the mathematical capacity to make the quick, precise calculations that
are trivial to a computer, what we can do is synthesize a large number
of sensory inputs and make conclusions based on them far in excess of
a computers capacity for wrote logical calculation.

The human sense of balance/motion is a tremendously powerful, and
tremendously fast, and very quick to adapt... thousands of generations
of bipedal travel are to thank for that. It would by stupid for us
not to take advantage of it.

Again as long as we, as pilots, understand when it can be tricked, and
how to overcome it.

Yes, such as takeoff rotation, climbs, descents, turns, landing
flares, and practically any other situation where you change the
aircraft's attitude and energy state.

All of these can be done successfully with instruments alone.

Landing flares simply cannot. I have a friend who is an Ex military
pilot, his last assignment was flying drones for the navy- he was
mentioning how the landing gear on the drones needs to be many orders
of magnitude stronger than for piloted aircraft simply because without
the sense of motion, landings flares are nearly impossible to judge
correctly. For the rest of the flight, he managed without any sense
of motion, but he mentioned it was one of the hardest assignments of
his career, far harder than, say, landing a sea-king on a pitching
destroyer's deck. And even then, the only way he managed to fly
precisely remotely was by visualizing and imagining the missing
sensations as he went.

When an IFR pilot begins a 500
FPM descent, he does so by pulling back the power until he feels the
aircraft enter the correct descent, only using the gauge to confirm
that the aircraft's attitude is what he expects it to be.

Are you sure?

Yes.

Does this mean that if he is disoriented and cannot feel the "correct
descent," he cannot descend?

Disorientation is generally along very specific attitudes and, with
practice, can be very easily ignored. That said, talk to any
instrument student about their first attempted instrument approach in
IMC in heavy turbulence... until the proper filters are in place, in
fact, doing the most simple of piloting tasks can seem damn near
impossible.

Nobody flies successfully for a few minutes just by depending on ANY
one source of information available to them, whether it by
instruments, seat of the pants, visual cues, or audio.

Not so. In good weather, one can fly for a considerable time using visual
cues alone.

Tell me please how any pilot in the aircraft is supposed to fly with
'visual cues alone'... The motion is there, and whether or not
they're consciously aware of it, they're responding to it.

Under any circumstances, one can fly indefinitely using
instruments alone.

I understand why you believe this, but it is arrogant, sophomoric and
incorrect. Period. Computers can, yes... but we are not computers.

But one cannot fly for more than a minute or two using
physical sensations alone.

No argument there... but I would never begin to say that using
physical sensations alone was a wise course of action. Physical
sensations, while very powerful and precise, "fall out of trim" _very_
easily, unless 'reset' by some other sensory outside reference.

This does not make them unreliable, it is just a constraint on their
use that a pilot must understand.

You are not me.

No, I'm not. However, I am someone with a shared experience. And
seeing as you are either unable or unwilling to take your experience
to the level that I have, you might find that if you listen to what I
have to say, I might just be able to express that further experience
in a way that helps you understand what you're missing.

When I first started flying, I too was utterly baffled at how any
pilot with even a modicum of intelligence could allow a graveyard
spiral to develop. Attitude Gyro's are trivial to read, the
situation is both unique and obvious, both by instrument readings and
other sensory inputs (sound and motion forces). I was just as cocky
as you are - come on, how hard is it to read your instruments?

Only now, after first had experience, have I begun to realize that the
graveyard spiral isn't the mark of an ignoramus of a pilot, it is a
particular situation brought about by a myriad of circumstances that
pits a pilot's own training in operating an aircraft against his
survival. I've even seen myself falling into the trap.

This is a tremendously powerful realization, and one that I think all
pilots should have. Sitting here, spouting off to pilots about how
'easy it is if you only follow your instruments' is not only
incorrect, its downright irresponsible and dangerous. You do _NOT_
understand the mechanisms and manner of training that pilots receive,
you have no concept of the full complexity of factors that can lead a
pilot, in the moment, to abandon something they 'know' is true in vain
attempt to bring their senses into order. Simply put, the experiences
involved are beyond verbal portrayal.

Sitting here spouting that 'its so easy' only serves to make those who
live in the fantasy rationalization that 'it could never happen to me,
I'm smart enough to know better' more likely to put themselves in a
situation where they get killed.

This is especially irritating coming from someone who I'm absolutely
certain (through my own personal experience) would not be able to
maintain a constant altitude or heading, VFR or IFR, in a real
airplane. Not because you're not intelligent, not because you don't
know how, but simply because "knowing" how intellectually is not
sufficient.

Then perhaps you can skip the comments about me and either discuss the topic
or abstain.

I wish it was that easy.

You frustrate me because I (perhaps incorrectly) recognize shadows of
my own personal demons in you. You are the modern manifestation of a
long-ago miserable period in my life where I walled myself off with
arrogant notions of intellectual superiority, oblivious to the value
and necessity of others' experience.