Successful checkride

On Oct 11, 10:32 am, "Mike Isaksen" wrote:
Larry Dighera wrote:
And remember, you will probably never be better prepared for IMC
operations than you are at this point.
"Tina" wrote in message ...
He may be legal to fly in IMC, but wait until he has a couple of
hundred hours of actual before thinking he's ready for hard intrument
conditions.

While I agree that no newly minted ifr pilot should jump into "hard"
instument conditions, very few instrument rated pilots get to a level of
"couple hundred hours of actual" while remaining in part 91 operations. And
almost every pilot I know planning any IMC reaches for the autopilot on
climbout. It's just too much work hand flying, processing the paperwork, and
keeping a conversation going with a chatty passenger.
I think what Larry ment is that the pilot's hand flying skills are probably
at the top of his game. I hope that any diminishing skills will be suffently
supplimented by experience, so to never to fall beyond the crossover point
of the old "skill vs confidence" chart.

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:53:59 -0000, Tina wrote
in . com:

I know very few instrument rated pilots, but my husband is one of
them. He would absolutely disagree that insrument flight is more
difficult than vfr after one gains some experience.

Well, there is IFR flight with autopilot and moving-map GPS in VMC,
and there is IFR flight in unstable IMC without an autopilot nor GPS.
In the first case, if all goes as planned, it's cake. But
single-pilot IFR hand-flown on-the-gages in convective IMC in
congested airspace is probably one of the most challenging tasks a
civil airman faces regardless of experience level.

What can be easier, he says, than flying somewhere, flying an approach,
looking up and finding the airport right where it should be.

There is an aspect of IFR operation that is easier than VFR; that is
the lack of necessity to scan for conflicting traffic in IMC, and the
reduction in air traffic as a result of VFR pilots staying on the
ground.


The others I know, who use their airplanes mostly for business travel,
feel the same way, Nearly all of them file an instrument flight plan
for any flight more than a short distance.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of those IFR hours
flown result in being conducted in actual instrument conditions.

Here in the east (NC) about
a third of his hours are under IMC -- except lately, we NEED rain --

So if the average pilot flies 100 hours a year, he would only log 30
hours of IMC a year. At that rate, it would take a pilot nearly seven
years to amass the 200 hours to which you referred. In seven years
the training that was little (or not) practiced will have degraded.

and he wouldn't dream of an afterdusk flight not under IFR.

That's a sound policy that adds a margin of safety. Without a horizon
or city lights, as might be encountered with a new moon over water or
the desert, a VFR pilot is effectively on-the-gages anyway, but both
VFR and IFR pilots must still scan for conflicting traffic in VMC.


It would be interesting to see of [if?] other more experienced pilots feel
that a newly minted rating guy will be at the top of his or her game.

That wasn't exactly my assertion. There are several aspects to IFR
operation: Planning, weather, navigation, communications, turns,
entries, holding patterns, regulations, instrument interpretation,
manual control input, and a myriad of lesser duties also associated
with VFR operations, not to mention emergency procedures that haven't
be recently practiced. Add in a little system failure, and it's very
easy to become task saturated.

In fact, long ago, newly rated pilots were encouraged to put a comment
on their flight plan "low time IFR". Maybe it's a lot different now.

I haven't heard of that. But there is support for students entering
such notes.