(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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When was a kid getting my instrument rating I asked a Northwest 747 captain if he ever “gets the leans” (trusts his inner ear vs. his instruments). He said, “the difference between you and me is that you are not yet 100 percent committed to believing what your instruments are telling you, and I am. Stick with it though, you will get there”.
27 years later and tens of thousands of hours flying and now instrument flying is just part of me; I never give it a second thought. It is just flying.
The issue isn’t so much with using the instruments, but trusting the instruments. If I tell you that I have a net worth of $2 billion, the chances are, you’ll think I’m lying. Now imagine you’re night flying in low visibility and you’re upside down pulling 1 G. You look at your attitude indicator (the half blue half brown ball that shows orientation) and it is upside down. But you feel like you’re still upright because that is what your body is telling you and there is no discernible visual cue of up or down by looking out the window. Knowing systems can fail, you think to yourself; “Attitude indicator must be acting up”. Some people even go as far as trying to troubleshoot the issue. They usually end up getting flustered once they start hearing all of the warnings.
It’s very difficult to overcome the natural senses and to fully trust the instruments.
It’s a good question and I agree that it’s hard to believe. I’m a flight instructor who can train people to fly IFR.
To ELI5, spin yourself around and around in an office chair until it feels normal. Then stop the chair and your head will spin and your eyes will go crazy. Now someone is there telling you that you are upright, not moving, and everything is normal. You don’t believe them, right? That’s what spatial disorientation is, and if you can’t figure it out quickly by trusting the instruments and knowing what to do to recover, you can rapidly break the airplane by putting too much stress on the wings.
Flying IFR isn’t hard if you’ve practiced it. You don’t say what kind of plane you’re talking about, but let’s say a Cessna. It may not have the instrumentation you need.
We should also talk about instrument procedures, which you learn and rehearse in your instrument training, and then are tested in your practical exam (the one that involves actual flying with an examiner). You only learn to perform these procedures in your training for an instrument rating. These procedures are developed by the FAA for safe departure, enroute travel and approach and landing in instrument conditions (bad visibility, more or less). They are mainly designed to avoid terrain and obstacles, but also to make the flow of air traffic manageable for air traffic controllers, as well as to set you up for a good landing when you pop out of a low cloud deck on your approach. Learning what everything means on these charts, how to do everything, what are the regulations, learning how to use the equipment in your plane properly in order to perform these procedures, and then developing the brain/eye/hand/foot skills to do them smoothly and safely is a big part of instrument training. And you have to do these things well while handling everything else about flying. You can’t even start instrument training until you have a private pilot license and you’ve amassed at least 150 flight hours.
You can fly an instrument procedure in good weather, if you want, but in bad weather, it’s required.
You have to do some IFR exposure as part of your VFR training, maybe an hour or so. You put a hold on inflight so you can only see your instruments and the instructor will pitch and yaw the aircraft. Then you have to level it, and do a 180 turn. This is in case you fly into a cloud and you need to get out asap.
Let me tell you, it’s HARD to ignore your body senses and override it with your instruments. And it’s exhausting. Even pilots with IFR training must continue to do it to stay current with the rating.
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.
Yes pilots can “just focus on their instruments and stay oriented” if they are trained to do so. The problem is that focusing on your instruments also means you have to ignore everything your body is telling you the airplane is doing. It’s very disorienting. You have to learn to ignore the fact that you feel like you are climbing and turning aggressively while you are actually flying straight and level, or realize that even though you feel like you are straight and level you really aren’t.
Combine that with the fact that you are going to have to do a lot of other things in addition to just staring at the instruments like change radios, reference checklists, read approach plates it’s easy for distractions to slow down your instrument cross check to the point that you don’t recognize a deviation until it’s too late.
Short answer is that just using the instruments is a harder skill to learn than one might think and in the weather for real is a bad time to try and figure it out the first time
The trick to flying IFR is to ignore every sense your body is telling you with regards to how you’re oriented. The other thing is that you have to keep up a continuous and vigilant scan of all your instruments while flying the aircraft and while listening to ATC for instructions and while thinking about what you’re going to do next. Single pilot IFR without autopilot is very difficult to learn. I trained in a helicopter where there is the added instability from that as well. To give you an idea of how careful you have to be: I leaned over to put in a transponder code for 5 seconds and when I looked back up to continue my instrument scan I was already 100 feet low. My hand had shifted slightly forward, not enough to notice it, and had put me in a shallow dive. That 100 feet would’ve failed me on my Instrument checkride.
Learning to fly on instruments is not natural, and you have to fight what your body is telling you. Your senses might be telling you your turning left and falling, but really you could be straight and level, or turning the other way. I’ve been flying for 20 years, and I still get disoriented at random times. A big one is at night. For example I was coming in on an arrival on a moonless night on the coast, looked over my shoulder for a second, then looked back and I saw dots of lights that I thought were stars, but they were boats and we were also in a turn, so I got super confused and it felt like I was falling sideways, but then I jumped right into the instruments and immediately knew where I was in space again. In this scenario, with no moon, I couldn’t see any horizon so everything ahead of me was black.
This was in an airliner by the way, so even at the professional level it can happen.
If it’s still hard to understand, think of this. Have you ever been in your car while parked, looking down or doing something, and out of the corner of your eye you think you’re moving and you sort of freak out for a second and have a sense of motion, but In reality, the car next to you is moving? That’s what it feels like. Your eyes and your brain are tricking you into believing your body is doing something it’s not.
Learning to trust your instruments, and to maintain a proper scan is key to being successful in flying IFR. Light GA (General Aviation) aircraft today are leagues ahead of what I learned to fly on. Back even just 20 years ago, most of us didn’t have autopilots, or we had very basic one or two axis (Altitude and Heading hold) autopilots, but they could be clunky. Flying in the clouds (Which can usually be bumpy) while operating as a single pilot, navigating with “Green needles” meaning, ground based navigation, and checking and/or cross checking your flight path can be difficult for inexperienced and experienced pilots alike. The advent of high tech autopilots help tremendously with flight management and taking a load off the pilot, which allowed a better scan to occur. That said, it also creates lazy pilots and there are many who simply use the autopilot as a massive crutch, and don’t learn proper scans, which can be disastrous if a failure occurs.
The accidents that occur are also more often than not, non-instrument rated pilots who get caught in instrument flight conditions. I know a handful of guys who were non-IFR rated and found themselves in a cloud or deteriorating conditions and luckily got themselves home. In these cases, pilots have little to no experience flying on instruments, even if they’re right there in front of you. They are easily disoriented or make bad decisions, such as descending to get out of a cloud and they end up crashing, or they try turning around and get disoriented and end up in a spiral and crash.
Flying on instruments is a lot of fun and completely opens up the world to you, but it’s not easy and definitely requires proper discipline. Attempting it without the proper training can be deadly.
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