(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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It is human instinct to navigate by our natural senses. It can be difficult to overcome that instinct, and ignore your natural senses in favor of machine readouts.
Edit: As an addendum to this, our natural senses are very poorly equipped to navigate in flight. We have no means of knowing how high we are or our absolute orientation, we can only infer these things from other cues like our sense of balance and sight. These cues can be easily hidden or misleading by things like cloud cover, turbulence, acceleration etc.
Flying with instruments requires you (in some situations) to ignore what you are seeing and feeling and rely on what the gauges, indicators, and maps are telling you. It can be tough to not peek out the windscreen (and sometimes that’s not even an option).
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?
The difficulty part is ignoring the part of your brain that tells you how it feels like the plane is moving and putting 100% trust in what the instruments tell you the plane is doing. It is very easy to get in a situation where you feel like the plane is banking hard when you are actually perfectly level and vice versa. The problems happen when pilots correct for something the plane isn’t doing.
Imagine your head tells you you’re turning right, the sensation on your butt feels like you’re leaning to the right and your eyes can’t tell you anything.
Except that the little round gauge in front of you disagrees. Sometimes your eyes don’t even believe what they’re seeing and the gauge that says level can even blurr into looking slightly to the right (confirming what you’re feeling)
It can be physically impossible to resist sometimes which is called incapacitating spatial disorientation.
Btw this is just one of the spatial disorientations you can feel when flying. There are others but this is called the death spiral – aptly named unfortunately.
Everyone here is talking about using instruments. Learning to use the instruments is actually relatively easy. Yeah there is some trust, but you rarely practice IMC anyway.
Most of the learning is procedures, there’s a LOT to learn about IFR procedures.
>why is flying on IFR (“Instrument Flight Rating”) so difficult?
Imagine driving your car from Indianapolis to Chicago with all the windows blacked out, you can only drive based on your instruments and GPS. Try to ignore the noises and sensations you are feeling, just follow the instruments.
Does that sound easy?
The inner ear can often mistake acceleration for climbing. When flying through a cloud or at night with no city lights (over an ocean) this is more pronounced.
Because a particular instrument only gives partial information. You look at this one then the next then the next then back to the first. Then the radios, map, other charts, engine, other crew, think of how you’re going to the next thing, figure out a fuel burn calculation, listen to a radio message to/from someone else, picture what they’re doing and where they are. Does it affect you?
It’s a lot to do all at once and if you see an instrument that’s wrong… what’s wrong how to fix it. What do you have to do to support that thing.
And all the while your body is lying to you. It feels like you’re falling but you’re actually level. This has to be level, no wait we’re turning. When you get behind you want to believe what you feel. Stress rises. It doesn’t feel like reading instruments, interpreting, combing information from several to get a picture, making a decision. There’s no time I can feel it I’ll just… and you’re upside down things are getting worse. Repeat.
With modern technology on a jumbo jet, planes can basically fly themselves on instruments. But that’s not usually the case with basic propeller planes. Flying IFR the old fashioned way is like playing a giant game of marco polo using radio signals. You can tell the direction of the beacons, but you still need to use a map and other information from the instruments to navigate. Then when it’s time to land, you add a third dimension and need to rely on radio signals and instruments to tell where the plane is relative to the ground and runway. It’s a lot of quick math and angles, along with correctly entering all the waypoints by hand, all in addition to flying the plane.
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