Curious about flying in IFR

On Sat, 7 Nov 2015 07:06:27 +1200, george152 wrote:

On 11/7/2015 4:41 AM, Larry Dighera wrote:


Flying in IMC is a great exercise of the brain.


I once wrote in 1998:

"For me, IFR flight is a lot like playing a game of Chess in the
blind while juggling three balls in the air and maintaining a
running conversation at a noisy cocktail party. You have to
mentally visualize the position of the "pieces" on the "board,"
continually monitor and interpret a myriad of arcane instruments
and make corrections to keep the airplane shinny side up, all
while constantly attempting to pick out the ATC communiques
intended for you from the rest of the "guests'" conversations. To
this add the _stress_ of the consequences of losing the game
(death). (Of course, this analogy fails to consider weather,
turbulence, flight planning, interpreting charts and plates,
tuning radios and OBS settings, equipment failures, ....)

Single-pilot IFR aircraft operation in the ATC system in IMC
without the benefit of Global Positioning Satellite receiver,
auto-pilot, and Active Noise Reduction headset, is probably one of
the most demanding things you will ever do."

Good summation.

With the cockpits of today a lot of the small parts are taken away.

But it still demands a high level of discipline



Thanks for the complement, George.

I still vividly recall an IFR flight during my training. My instructor, Dan
Newman, and I were always hoping for some "actual" conditions, so that I'd have
a better idea of what to expect once I was on my own. One particularly wet
day, we were in the office trying to decide if the weather may be a bit too
much for our scheduled lesson. Just then, in a gust of wind an instructor and
his student, burst into the office all exuberant and spirited. They had just
landed, and said that it had been a pretty rough ride, and traffic was thick,
but they thought we should launch.

So we pre-flighted and filed from KSBA (John Wayne, Santa Ana, California) to
KVNY (Van Nuys). We departed in heavy rain, and soon entered KLAX (Los
Angeles) busy Class Bravo terminal area. Turbulence was significant, and
visibility was nonexistent, and it sounded like the sky was full of airliners.

Attempting to contact the controller in the next sector, who sounded a bit
overwhelmed with his workload, was a real chore, as we couldn't get a word in
edgewise, and he was giving the airline traffic priority. About that time, we
must have entered a cell or something, as I was only able to hold heading
within about plus or minus 30 degrees, and altitude was all over the place too.
I felt like a cowboy at his first rodeo, but hung in there without the
necessity of the instructor taking the controls. Finally, we proceeded via
radar vectors to the KVNY runway 34L approach, and broke out of the overcast to
see a soggy runway on the nose. A gusty cross wind nearly blew me off the edge
of the runway into the grass as I was about to touch down, but was able to
recover successfully, and plant it firmly on the macadam. Whew! What a
memorable ride. :-)