(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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Others will have covered the body lying to you and having to make yourself trust the instruments.
The thing i didn’t see mentioned is instruments lie and each tells a different set of lies. Think about the gas gauge in your car. Does it read accurate? Does it show full when it’s full or above or below? When the gauge shows empty are you out of gas? If not do you have gallons or miles?
ELI5
Stand in the middle of a large flat floored area (like a basketball court)
Face at a specific point, close your eyes, block your ears and walk until you think you are there (be sure it’s at least 100 steps)
Before you open your eyes you are 100% sure you are where you think you are. But imagine a little thing in your brain saying no your 5 steps to the left, and 3 steps short.
Do you take the 3 steps forward or trust your senses that you are where you think you are?
Thats flying ifr but only in 2d (front/back, left/right)
In flying there’s a 3rd, and are bodies (mainly our ears) are very easily tricked into believing our orientation, and our eyes are what correct for this. In IMC your eyes tell you are level because the dash in the plane is level. But outside is just white, it’s not until you can see horizon that you realise how wrong you were.
In the same way as you open your eyes and find your not where you thought you were on the court.
basically, you first learn how to fly visual. and like driving, you don’t really realize how much becomes intuitive or subconscious.
When you start learning Instrument flying, you basically have to “unlearn” a lot of that instinct and trust the instruments. It can be incredibly disorienting, especially when training in actual IFR conditions. when you lose your peripheral vision and landmarks you brain plays a lot of tricks on you. everything is telling you the plane is drifting left, so you automatically correct and start banking to the right. It takes a lot of practice and discipline to efficiently scan your instruments and trust your eyes (ironically) instead of every other sensory organ in your body.
The basic skills of reading instruments well and trusting your eyes and not your senses is learned at the private pilot level. It’s not really all that difficult. It’s mostly a matter of developing an awareness that your inner ear plays tricks on you in certain flight conditions. That awareness, combined with practice drills let a pilot trust their instruments and ignore their sensations properly.
The thing that makes obtaining an IFR rating difficult is all the additional knowledge you have to absorb. IFR means a pilot can fly in instrument conditions (can only see the clouds or fog your flying in). Trusting instruments and keeping the plane flying properly has to already be a solid skill.
Figuring out how to get where you need to go without being able to see takes a lot of time in the books. So does learning how to do an instrument approach to an airport. Same with things like holding patterns, federal aviation regulations, missed approach procedures, reading charts, and filing flight plans.
Professional pilots spend way more time than you might assume reviewing regulations and procedures to maintain proficiency. Even if they’ve been flying for years.
The hardest part of being a pilot is not the physical skills of flying. It’s the academics.
I once was parking my car and just when i fully braked, a car beside me drove out its space. The feeling of your car not moving but seeing the car outside moved messed with my brain enough to hurt. I imagine its at least a hundred times worse foe pilots flying IFR
As someone who’s only done a single discovery flight (+ a good bit of vr flight sim), I’m still a little confused.
In my flight I was paying attention to and relying on the instruments so much more than my eyes and feeling. Keeping your air speed, altitude, and orientation can only be accurately accomplished with instruments. The only visual reference you have is the horizon. But you have the turn coordinator (or whatever it’s called… bank angle thingy). So I have a hard time understanding how someone could end up nose down or stalling. It’s all right in front of you. Pilots, help me understand the issue here. It seems easy.
Again, almost no experience. But I’d like to get it.
FWIW, I fly a paraglider quite a bit. The only instruments I use are a phone for maps/tracking and a variometer that beeps to signal altitude gain when finding a thermal.
Two factors that others have not mentioned. First, instruments are MUCH less precise than looking out the window. You can easily see a 1 degree bank or pitch, but on the relatively small instruments, is not so obvious. Second, VFR pilots are have not practiced the routine of looking at all the instruments. The “scan” is difficult if not practiced, and quite fatiguing as well. It’s like trying to juggle while riding a bike–each element is a simple skill, but put it all together and it’s not easy
Those are training glasses for IFR flight. Imagine trying to walk around your house wearing those,and imagine how many times you’d bump in to shit.
On the surface, flying on instruments is easy. Look at what the instrument says and make sure it still says what you want it to say and if not, fix it. There are 6 primary instruments that tell you everything that you need to know about how the plane is oriented in the sky.
The tricky part is developing a visual scan to cross check each of those 6 primary instruments against each other to verify they are all correct. There’s redundancy built into those 6 instruments so that they are grouped and powered by different systems so if you cross check an instrument that runs off your pitot/static system with one that runs off your electrical system, you should be able to determine which instrument failed and is lying to you. This can be pretty insidious because if you don’t recognize that an instrument is lying to you, you’ll keep following it.
On top of all this, you are trying to ignore the sensations your body is trying to tell you by your sense of balance. In your head behind each ear are these 3-tubed organs filled with cillia and fluid. When your head is at rest the fluid is at rest. However, when you move your head, that fluid moves in the opposite direction and moves the cillia which then activates nerves telling the brain movement occurred. Your brain then cross checks this with what your eyes are seeing to confirm if this makes sense. It’s not 100% accurate though. When you spin in a circle and then stop suddenly, you feel dizzy because that fluid is still moving and telling your brain you’re moving but your eyes are telling your brain you stopped. This confuses your brain and it assumes the inner ear is correct because it almost always is, and makes it look like the room is spinning. Your sense of balance, assuming no structural or health issues, is very powerful and almost always accurate.
The problem with this when flying IFR is that you completely remove the visual cross check and deprive your brain information about where the horizon is. Since your inner ear is filled with fluid, any type of acceleration will move that fluid causing your brain to think that’s how you’re moving. It’s also not precise enough to tell you how much you’ve moved and doesn’t work as well with subtle changes. So if you enter a very gentle bank while flying IFR, your brain might not even register it. If you never realize you’re in that bank, it’ll continue and eventually you’ll feel other forces on your body that don’t make sense (like gravity pulling you sideways) and you’ll become spatially disoriented.
So basically what makes it challenging is you’re attempting to ignore, or at least disregard, information from your body that you’ve evolved to trust, as well constantly scanning and cross checking your 6 primary instruments on top of monitoring your navigation equipment and engine instruments, talking on the radios, and overall mentally trying to stay ahead of the plane during the flight. This is all skill and experience based and is all something that can be learned over time. You also start picking up on other cues too, like does the engine or the airflow around the air frame sound normal or are they getting quieter (indicating you’re moving slower) or louder (indicating you’re moving faster). The key to all this is remaining spatially oriented and aware of what the plane is doing at all times. Airliners have even more redundancy built into them than smaller single engine aircraft like Cessnas and other general aviation aircraft which is partly why GA is involved in more accidents. Also GA pilots might not have as much experience or frequency flying on instruments that airline pilots do, so are more likely to make mistakes. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen at the airline level, but it’s much less likely. However, anyone can become distracted or spatially disoriented and lose track of what the plane is doing if they’re not careful.
Have you ever been sitting in a parking lot and both cars next to you start to back up at the same time? You instinctively go for the brake because your body is wholly convinced that you’re moving forward…even though your speedometer (ie instrument) tells you in no uncertain terms that you are stationary.
It’s one thing to say “just focus on the instruments”, but actually consciously forcing yourself to reject the immensely strong sensations in your body are another thing entirely. Plus, while doing all this sensory rejection and instrument processing, the pilot also has to read approach plates, communicate with air traffic control, brief passengers and crew members, etc etc. Hand-flying IFR is very very hard, which is why it requires a specialized rating and many hours of training and practice.
There is also a currency requirement (in the US, anyway): a pilot must fly at least 6 instrument approaches and must practice holding patterns, intercepting courses, and tracking courses (aka “6 HITs”), in actual or simulated instrument conditions, every 6 months. If they fail to keep up with this recurring practice, they can’t fly IFR until they accomplish 6 HITs again. If they still don’t get the practice in for another 6 months, they must do an instrument proficiency check with a flight instructor before flying IFR again.
None of these requirements apply to VFR (visual flight rules) flying, because it’s much easier, more intuitive, and you don’t lose the muscle memory nearly as easily.
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