(Edit: “Rules,” not “Rating.” Sorry.)
Obviously I don’t know beans about flying, but I see many stories about inexperienced pilots who get disoriented flying through clouds, sometimes even to the point of flying upside-down. Aren’t there instruments on your control panel which tell you your speed, altitude, and orientation? How can you be plummeting towards the ground and not notice?
I hope this question isn’t so ignorant as to be insulting. I know flying is difficult and complicated and it’s easy to criticize from here on the ground. I wish I was skilled enough to know how to fly a plane. I just see many stories about accidents where inexperienced pilots seem to be making apparently ridiculous mistakes.
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On the surface, flying on instruments is easy. Look at what the instrument says and make sure it still says what you want it to say and if not, fix it. There are 6 primary instruments that tell you everything that you need to know about how the plane is oriented in the sky.
The tricky part is developing a visual scan to cross check each of those 6 primary instruments against each other to verify they are all correct. There’s redundancy built into those 6 instruments so that they are grouped and powered by different systems so if you cross check an instrument that runs off your pitot/static system with one that runs off your electrical system, you should be able to determine which instrument failed and is lying to you. This can be pretty insidious because if you don’t recognize that an instrument is lying to you, you’ll keep following it.
On top of all this, you are trying to ignore the sensations your body is trying to tell you by your sense of balance. In your head behind each ear are these 3-tubed organs filled with cillia and fluid. When your head is at rest the fluid is at rest. However, when you move your head, that fluid moves in the opposite direction and moves the cillia which then activates nerves telling the brain movement occurred. Your brain then cross checks this with what your eyes are seeing to confirm if this makes sense. It’s not 100% accurate though. When you spin in a circle and then stop suddenly, you feel dizzy because that fluid is still moving and telling your brain you’re moving but your eyes are telling your brain you stopped. This confuses your brain and it assumes the inner ear is correct because it almost always is, and makes it look like the room is spinning. Your sense of balance, assuming no structural or health issues, is very powerful and almost always accurate.
The problem with this when flying IFR is that you completely remove the visual cross check and deprive your brain information about where the horizon is. Since your inner ear is filled with fluid, any type of acceleration will move that fluid causing your brain to think that’s how you’re moving. It’s also not precise enough to tell you how much you’ve moved and doesn’t work as well with subtle changes. So if you enter a very gentle bank while flying IFR, your brain might not even register it. If you never realize you’re in that bank, it’ll continue and eventually you’ll feel other forces on your body that don’t make sense (like gravity pulling you sideways) and you’ll become spatially disoriented.
So basically what makes it challenging is you’re attempting to ignore, or at least disregard, information from your body that you’ve evolved to trust, as well constantly scanning and cross checking your 6 primary instruments on top of monitoring your navigation equipment and engine instruments, talking on the radios, and overall mentally trying to stay ahead of the plane during the flight. This is all skill and experience based and is all something that can be learned over time. You also start picking up on other cues too, like does the engine or the airflow around the air frame sound normal or are they getting quieter (indicating you’re moving slower) or louder (indicating you’re moving faster). The key to all this is remaining spatially oriented and aware of what the plane is doing at all times. Airliners have even more redundancy built into them than smaller single engine aircraft like Cessnas and other general aviation aircraft which is partly why GA is involved in more accidents. Also GA pilots might not have as much experience or frequency flying on instruments that airline pilots do, so are more likely to make mistakes. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen at the airline level, but it’s much less likely. However, anyone can become distracted or spatially disoriented and lose track of what the plane is doing if they’re not careful.
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