(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 trick to flying IFR is to ignore every sense your body is telling you with regards to how you’re oriented. The other thing is that you have to keep up a continuous and vigilant scan of all your instruments while flying the aircraft and while listening to ATC for instructions and while thinking about what you’re going to do next. Single pilot IFR without autopilot is very difficult to learn. I trained in a helicopter where there is the added instability from that as well. To give you an idea of how careful you have to be: I leaned over to put in a transponder code for 5 seconds and when I looked back up to continue my instrument scan I was already 100 feet low. My hand had shifted slightly forward, not enough to notice it, and had put me in a shallow dive. That 100 feet would’ve failed me on my Instrument checkride.
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