(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
Well, a big problem for pilots both experienced and inexperienced is the lack of a visual horizon can cause the brain to get confused and think they are turning when they are in fact flying straight and level. This causes the pilot to want to overcorrect, which in fact puts the airplane into a turn. It gets worse for the pilot as their inner ear lies to tell and tells them that they are still banking the other way, so they correct more and more until either they figure it out or cause the aircraft to become unflyable. More than one pilot has died because of vertigo.
The other difficulty is that there is a lot going on causing more pilot workload to increase. The pilot has to listen very carefully to the radio instructions from ATC, fly the aircraft in accordance with those instructions and follow carefully designed flight paths to take off and land. This is an example of such a thing, called an [approach plate. ](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/Cologne-ILS-14L.png/1024px-Cologne-ILS-14L.png) Pretty complex, right?
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