"T" wrote in message
...
Find a school or instructor who uses a simulator to train. A plane in the
air is a bad classroom.

Yes and no. Yes, a plane in the air is a bad classroom, but a classroom on
the ground is a good one. Any school that doesn't have a good chunk of
traditional whiteboards-and-hand-waving ground school/preparation for each
flight, and then a decent chunk of debriefing afterwards, is likely not to
be a good place to learn. This doesn't mean that you have to brief all
flights for ages (if there's not much to say, don't say much) but that you
should brief _appropriately_.

When I did my IMC rating (a 15-hour UK-only course) we probably averaged
30-40 minutes on the ground for each hour spent in the air. Sometimes it was
less (e.g. "We're going to go and do some more ILS stuff like we did
yesterday") and sometimes more. Without fail each flight would be followed
by one or two cups of coffee, over which we'd go into what I did well, what
could be improved, and how to improve it - and this was all written into my
folder so that any instructor I went up with could know exactly where I was
up to and what my shortcomings were.

As for simulators: they have their place, mainly as:

(a) An introduction
If you can show someone how an ILS behaves when you're too
high/low/left/right, how to ident a beacon, etc, etc on the ground then this
is cheaper and quicker than doing it in the air. My instructor used to
instruct on commercial helicopter sims, and he loved them because if you
wanted to (say) fly an approach again, you got the guy outside to press the
button and *bang*, there you were at the start of the approach - no farting
about flying around for 15 minutes to get back in position.

(b) A stress-free consolidation tool
I practised approaches a lot on a PC flight sim, and I found it helped - and
in fact I find maintaning height/speed slightly harder on a PC sim than in a
real aircraft because on a sim power control can be quite coarse and also
you don't get the "feel" of the result of your power changes that you get in
the real thing. Flying an ILS or NDB approach on a sim with a coffee beside
you and the knowledge that you're not going to kill yourself is a good way
to practise the processes and concepts.

It is, however, hugely important to actually get out and do this stuff in
real IMC. Yes, you can simulate howling winds in your sim, but actually
spending time doing it for real and trying out the techniques you've been
taught for flying a hold in a stiff wind. And I don't know a sim that can do
a talkdown (weirdly, I found talkdowns immense fun).

In the average (i.e. general aviation) case, then, a sensible course will be
a mix of ground school and flying, and simulators can be used as well (but
they shouldn't be used instead). Obviously this doesn't apply to commercial
types with their full-motion simulators, but that's an entirely different
world!

David C