"Dan" wrote:
So what does everyone think about the proposed new IFR currency
requirements? The major changes seem to be that 1 hour of cross-
country time will be required, along with six approaches, consisting
of BOTH precision and non-precision, and two types of holds.

This all seems perfectly reasonable. The old rules (previous to what we
operate under today) required "six and six", i.e. 6 approaches and 6 hours
of flight time. Getting rid of the 6 hours of flight time was a rather
drastic reduction; this moves us back a little bit towards where it used to
be.

The way the rules are written today, you can maintain currency by getting
vectors to the same ILS at your home drome 6 times and doing one hold.
Repeat every six months. By this time, you should have the fixes and
altitudes memorized and can probably read back the vectors in your sleep.
You can do it in broad daylight, and pick a day when there's no wind, no
traffic, and the weather is CAVU. And 5 months after this pencil-whipping,
you're still current to launch into single pilot night IFR in rain and 20
kts of wind and 200 foot ceilings.

All the one hour of cross-country flying does is make you get out of the
pattern of your home airport. You might have to get a real weather
briefing before you launch instead of just sticking your head out the door
and looking up.

I like the hold requirement too. More and more, we're becoming dependent
on GPS and forgetting traditional techniques. If twice a year you need to
tune in a real VOR and play with the needles, is that going to kill you?

Most of it sounds OK to me, however I think the 1 hour of cross-
country time is pointless. What would be considered cross-country? It
is a little vague...

Pointless? No. I do agree with you that's it's a little vague. I'd like
to see them define better what they mean by "cross country". There are
various definitions of cross country in the book for various purposes. I
think what makes sense here is "a full stop landing at an airport 50 miles
from your point of departure", although I suppose Alaska bush pilots might
object to having their destination limited to an airport.