(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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If you felt like you were falling you’d want to do something, right? Well here’s the thing… our sense of orientation and such isn’t perfect a lot of it is about noticing a change and combining that sense with our other senses. if you were in a spinning chair and closed your eyes, you’d feel getting spun but you don’t know exactly how much. If I spun you a bit to the left, then a different amount to the right, then a different amount to the left… you might feel like you know which way you’re pointing, but odds are you may have been a little off with each movement and those errors can add up. If I kept doing it eventually you’d have no way to know where you’re pointing. But if I let you open your eyes, all the sudden your brain reorients yourself to where you are.
Even our sense of balance works a bit like that and if you lean a little to the left for a while you can start to get used to it and feel that’s normal, and you’re in a plane and you can see the dashboard in front of you so your brain starts putting mixed signals, seeing the dashboard and thinking that’s horizontal, even if you’re tilted. So as you’re flying and even somewhat tilted, your brain can get that input from your eyes and say “yup this is straight”.
It’s a pretty different situation, but tom Scott went into a spinning artificial gravity and it’s interesting how the brain is confused but eventually adapts to the spinning of the room: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ_seXo-Encf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJ_seXo-Encf)
If the plane slowly started to tilt to one side, but your brain adapts and says “this is normal” then you look at your gauges and see you’re tilted, you may try to correct but then feel that all the sudden the plane that was fine is now tilting. Who are you going to trust you or this gauge that you had to calibrate before you took off because it can go out of calibration? A lot of people will go “this is not right” and then try to “correct” the plane by turning it to what feels right and assume the gauge is screwed up, or might panic and not even be looking at the gauge. It takes a lot of training to trust the gauges.
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