transitioning from instruments to visual landing on final

Gerald Sylvester wrote:

The biggest problem I had was going from the IFR part to the
visual on short final. The night time might have had something
to do with it but regardles I had a hard time adjusting. I presume
this is somewhat normal. Any words of wisdom?

I wouldn't call this wisdom -- I got my rating only nine months ago -- but
for me, the important thing is not to muddle around. When you're IFR, you
want to be either on instruments (full scan) or visual (looking outside and
cross-checking instruments), but never halfway in-between.

The hood or foggles do a lousy job of showing what IFR flying is really
like. In real life, it's often a matter of flicking in and out of cloud
tops or cloud bottoms, alternating between IMC and VMC every few minutes or
even every few seconds. To pull that off, you have to imagine a virtual
switch in your brain between instrument flying and visual flying and flick
it back and forth as conditions change -- even say it out loud to yourself
if it helps.

Landing is just a special case of that problem. I find it useful to decide
in advance when I'm going to start looking for the runway (assuming the
weather is low enough for a full IAP rather than a visual approach). Until
I hit that time or altitude, I'm only on instruments; at the moment when I
hit my preselected point, I look up for the runway.

If I can see the runway clearly, I throw the virtual switch in my head to
"visual" and finish the landing; if not, I plan to stay on "instruments"
until the DH or MAP and then go missed (so far, I have not had to do a
missed approach -- my rule is never to start out unless my destination is
forecasting at least standard alternate minima).

Staring out the windshield saying "I can sort-of see the runway, but I still
need to sort-of follow the ILS and sort-of use the gyros to keep the plane
level" is probably not a good flying mode -- your "instruments/visual"
switch is stuck in the middle.

I hope that you enjoy your IFR training as much as I enjoyed mine last year
-- it can be frustrating sometimes, but it can also be a lot of fun, and it
made an enormous difference in the usefulness of my plane.


All the best, and good luck,


David