(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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The basic skills of reading instruments well and trusting your eyes and not your senses is learned at the private pilot level. It’s not really all that difficult. It’s mostly a matter of developing an awareness that your inner ear plays tricks on you in certain flight conditions. That awareness, combined with practice drills let a pilot trust their instruments and ignore their sensations properly.
The thing that makes obtaining an IFR rating difficult is all the additional knowledge you have to absorb. IFR means a pilot can fly in instrument conditions (can only see the clouds or fog your flying in). Trusting instruments and keeping the plane flying properly has to already be a solid skill.
Figuring out how to get where you need to go without being able to see takes a lot of time in the books. So does learning how to do an instrument approach to an airport. Same with things like holding patterns, federal aviation regulations, missed approach procedures, reading charts, and filing flight plans.
Professional pilots spend way more time than you might assume reviewing regulations and procedures to maintain proficiency. Even if they’ve been flying for years.
The hardest part of being a pilot is not the physical skills of flying. It’s the academics.
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