(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.
In: Other
Yes pilots can “just focus on their instruments and stay oriented” if they are trained to do so. The problem is that focusing on your instruments also means you have to ignore everything your body is telling you the airplane is doing. It’s very disorienting. You have to learn to ignore the fact that you feel like you are climbing and turning aggressively while you are actually flying straight and level, or realize that even though you feel like you are straight and level you really aren’t.
Combine that with the fact that you are going to have to do a lot of other things in addition to just staring at the instruments like change radios, reference checklists, read approach plates it’s easy for distractions to slow down your instrument cross check to the point that you don’t recognize a deviation until it’s too late.
Short answer is that just using the instruments is a harder skill to learn than one might think and in the weather for real is a bad time to try and figure it out the first time
Latest Answers