(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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Flying instruments isn’t the problem. Any monkey can line up the needles with some practice. That basic instrument work isn’t where people fall out. It’s the procedures, the rules, and the when-this-fails-what-can-you-do-now.
Except flying a helicopter with only 30-minutes of turn needle, airspeed, compass, and ball. You can’t think about anything but flying.
Follow up question, do you think younger pilots are more proficient at it due to growing up with video games?
You can obtain an instrument rating, but “flying IFR” is flying utilizing *Instrument Flight Rules*. As a basic overview, there’s VMC and IMC, which are the weather conditions you are flying in. Visual Meteorological Conditions (it’s clear outside) or Instrument Meteorological Conditions (it’s cloudy). But those are separate from VFR and IFR which are Visiual Flight Rules (see and avoid, don’t hit anybody; pilot in command is in charge of separation of aircraft) and Instrument Flight Rules (flying on instruments and as direction by a controller; controller is responsible for separation of aircraft.)
As for why flying IFR is so difficult it’s mostly just human error, really. Instrument flying is actually *really* easy. You look at your altimeter and…wow.. it says the exact feet you are above the ground. You look at your airspeed and it tells you how fast you are going relative to the wind around you. You look at your GPS and it tells you how fast you are going relative to the ground. You look at your vertical speed indicator and it tells you how many feet-per-minute you are gaining or losing. You can have a few other instruments that tell you where the ground/terrain obstacles are at and if they are a danger or if other planes are approaching and what their altitudes are relative to you.
You don’t really even have to navigate yourself – the controller does most of it for you. They will tell you to climb to 25,000 feet, or 35,000 feet, or descend to 15,000 feet, etc. They will tell you to turn east, west, north, south, and for how long. Many modern GPS instruments can even auto-fly the plane on exact corridors (highways in the sky).
So, what’s makes it difficult? What’s this “human error”. The error is when pilots, more specifically the pilot’s inner ears and brain tell them they are descending when they are actually level or ascending; if they are turning left or right when they are not turning at all or in the opposite direction. This can occur because our ears can tell us our bodily orientation relative to the world around us but we can *verify that* with our eyes. But if you’re in a cloudy, soupy mix of grey and white you can’t do that. You may feel like you are leaning left and climbing but in reality your instruments are telling you that you are actually flying straight ahead and level. So you might not trust your instruments and initiate a descending right turn…straight into the ground or whatever is below you. That’s dangerous. **TRUST YOUR INSTRUMENTS**.
The other thing that makes flying on instruments so difficult isn’t the actual flying – it’s the rules. There are a ton of rules, procedures, do’s-and-dont’s to flying and especially on instrument rules. Every pilot in the sky has to play by the same set of rules, utilizing the same rulebook, so if anybody ever finds themselves in a weird or unusual situation, or a situation where their sitauational awareness is degraded, they can know the traffic around them will do X, Y, or Z because that is *standard*. There’s rules about turning; there’s rules about departing an airfield; there’s rules about flying an approach using instruments. A whole lot of rules!
I can teach you to fly in a day. How to fly straight and level, turn, climb, descend, talk on the radios. Land and take off well enough so you won’t kill yourself (but it does take practice).
I can teach you to fly utilizing GPS RNAV, VOR, ILS/LOC, NDB, etc (these are all just different types of things you can use to fly on instruments) on the second day.
But you will need to spend weeks, months, or years to really and truly understand all the intricacies, rules, and procedures that would be required of you to fly legally by yourself. Most Joe Schmoes don’t actually learn to fly IFR/instruments. They learn VFR and get a Private Pilot’s license and that’s good enough to fly around the farm/local area.
The US military (Air Force, at least) can teach you the rules and procedures to fly VFR and IFR in about 6-12 months for instance. Others take a lot longer because they’re not flying every day, multiple times per day. Which is why it can take years on the civilian side.
You really answered your own question. Yes a pilot can focus on the instruments to fly the plane. An IFR rating just means they have been properly trained to do so. As others have mentioned, a big part of this training is teaching the pilot to ignore certain physiological instincts. The alternative to IFR is VFR, which means the pilot is relying primarily on visual references outside of the aircraft to fly.
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.
I’ve been through some simulator training where every ounce of your being would tell you that you are either level, or turning right… and you are in fact in a deep dive turning left headed straight for a crash landing.
It’s very difficult to overcome this and trust your instruments.
I flew with a pilot in a small plane once, he said IFR stood for “I follow roads”….yes, he was joking, but I still remember it being funny.
One thing I’ve not seen mentioned is in addition to being able to rely on the instruments, with IFR there are a huge range of procedures for when things don’t go quite to plan.
Cloud too low on approach, got to go missed the right way.
Things getting busy? Controller asks you to hold at the next fix. You need to know how to do it in a controlled and predictable manner.
Now what happens when an instrument goes bad? Or your radios? Lots more things can cause issues IFR and you need to be able to handle them.
Put your back againsf a wall and try walking 20 steps in a straight line. Now do a 180, close your eyes and walk back the way you came. You know exactly what’s there, you know it’s flat, you know there’s an obstacle right in front of you, but you probably felt extremely disoriented. You probably didnt walk straight, thought you were going to hit the wall, felt a little off balance, etc.
I’m not a pilot but a buddy of mine. Flying through a cloud is like moving through an area where god stopped drawing. It’s completely blank and disorienting. It’s hard to fight the human brain, even with instruments.
The biggest problem for me and other students when we did our training, was that human brains suck. We can become fixated, ignore what instruments are telling us, not trust them, not pay attention, basically human factors are the #1 cause of accidents.
Case in point, I was flying with a friend who was time building. She flew into a cloud (at night(you can’t see them until you are in them)), I expected her to turn around, do a 180 and go to where we came from.
So she starts the turn, and we bank, and bank more, and more, and more, until I grab the controls and very politely yell at her “what the fuck are you doing???”
Her answer, was “Oh, I was watching our speed”
Point here is that even though she had the required training to fly into and then out of a cloud. She failed. People fail because we make mistakes and are human.
Flying is easy to do(very easy), hard to do right.
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