(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 problem is that your body will lie to you. And it takes a lot of training to overcome this. If you can’t see outside because you are in a cloud, you’ll think you are flying straight and level, but you will eventually end up in a turn. The turn forces will make you think you are more level than you are and eventually the turn gets very steep and you crash.
The antidote to this is to believe your artificial horizon and your compass and your turn and bank indicator and ignore what your body is saying. But that takes training to believe the instruments and do what they tell you to do, not what your inner ear says.
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