Take off from Motueka, 400 ft AGL intercept radial 293 and track towards Nelson. At this time I put the hood on. This is a sexy little number (I'll see if I can get of a photo of someone wearing one) which restricts the vision to the instruments only. So now on instruments the procedure is to get clearance into Nelson Control Zone, climbing to 7000 ft. Once overhead Nelson, join the Nelson hold for three laps. Then an approach and missed approached and head back out to the 15 DME arc before heading back for another missed approach followed by vacating back to Motueka. Simple eh? Well all that took two hours, and if someone had asked me what my name was during that time I would have been fumbling through the procedures and checks to see if it was in there, 'cos I had no idea!
Well now doing all that, while doing quick rate of climb and decent calculations, and figuring out what sort of join in the hold I'll be doing, all the while trying to figure out if I'm inside or outside the arc and trying to maintain altitude and track...the horse is definately part of the juggling act.
When I was doing my PPL and CPL training, instrument flying was never a strong point. We had to learn the basics of instrument flying, so that if we ever found ourselves in a situation where the weather had suddenly turned bad or we'd accidently flown into cloud, then we had enough skills to keep the aircraft straight and level. Flying an aircraft without being able to see the horizon or ground is not easy. To try this without training takes only a matter of seconds before the pilot has put the aircraft in a spiral dive. The body does it's best to think you're tipping over when infact you are upright. So you try to recover from this feeling, and then it gets all bad. Famous occurances of this include the late JFK juniors fateful decision to fly to Martha's Vinyard. Yep, this is something not to be taken lightly.
In one sense IFR is easier in that the pilot has to follow a set of rules and procedures. There doesn't appear to be a lot of grey area here, unlike VFR where individual judgement plays a big part in safe aviating. The tricky part in IFR however is being able to do several of those procedures at once. This is multitasking hell. Just being able to keep the aircraft straight and level on instruments is tricky enough. It's not bad on a good day, but on a day when there's quite a bit of wind thrown in the mix it will get interesting.
Add to this the radio calls, briefing the next procedure to be performed, monitoring the state of the aircraft, making various mathematical calculations (top of decent, rates of climb etc)...yep, it's a recipe for disaster if ya get behind at any stage. And further down the track I'll be dealing with various emergencies that the instructor will thrown at me.
All in all though it is fairly satisfying to be able to get somewhere just by looking at a few instruments. And up until now, being a VFR pilot, I have been restricted to flying only when weather permits, and flying beneath cloud. The idea of being able to fly through the cloud to get on top is pretty exciting. It's always sunny up there!! Well, that's if you are able to get up above it and not be stuck IN it!
One last thing. I'm sitting here thinking that I'm throwing round terms like VFR IFR MEIR etc, which is ok for those who are into aviation. But for those who have no idea what I'm on about, I have created a terminology page. This can be accessed at the top right hand corner of this blog, or just click here.
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