Instrument Rating done. What next?

Peter wrote:

As you seem to be based around Shoreham, I’ll drop you a line if I am going somewhere IFR.

Thanks. That would be wonderful. I actually live in Surrey but Shoreham is only an hour’s drive. In fact, I saw you there last week. I was going to come over and say hello but I was very close to my skills test and was feeling the pressure at that point.

chrisparker wrote:

I see you’re at Fairoaks – let’s go flying one day!

@chrisparker That would be wonderful. Let’s do that. I’ll email you.

Christophe wrote:

@fattony: Congrats on the rating. Could you tell us about the experience of going through the training (both TK and practical) please?

I started studying for the ATPL TK exams about two years ago. I don’t know what the TK requirements are if you want to do the IR without the CPL, but I did the fourteen ATPL exams because I intend to do the CPL.

I was fortunate enough to be able to work a compressed week doing full-time hours over four days and having Fridays off work. I spent 8 hours every Friday, 2 hours every Saturday and 2 hours every Sunday learning Bristol Ground School’s course material. I sat the exams in two sittings. The first sitting consisted of eight exams:

Aircraft General Knowledge – Instrumentation
General Navigation
Meteorology
Human Performance
VFR Communications
IFR Communications
Air Law
Flight Planning and Flight Monitoring

The second sitting consisted of six exams:

Radio Navigation
Aircraft General Knowledge – Airframes, Systems and Powerplants
Mass and Balance
Operational Procedures
Principles of Flight
Performance

I found the exams hard. I found studying for them even harder. I struggled working full-time and then finding the motivation to study subject matter that is, frankly, mostly very dull. A lot of it is very out of date and, while interesting from a trivia perspective, is not that relevant to commercial flying in the 21st century and is frustrating to learn. I definitely would not have been able to do the exams if I had not been in a position to work a compressed week.

The exams were hard. Motivation is difficult. The subjects are often abstract and boring. Having said all that, Bristol Ground School were excellent. Their instructors are first class. Not only do they teach you to pass the exams but they also teach you the subject matter. I had a MUCH better understanding of the material after doing their revision courses. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them. And I passed all the exams first time, which I think is testament to their teaching.

Once I’d finished the exams I had a couple of months off. During that time I visited a few flying schools to get a feel for them and decide at which one I wanted to do the practical flying. I decided on FTA at Shoreham for two reasons. Firstly, I could commute from home and, secondly, they have a modern fleet of Diamond aircraft. For a long time I’ve wanted to fly Diamonds.

I took three months off work and started with the MEP rating. I thought I was done with written exams but the MEP course involves an extra theory exam. My heart sank when I discovered that. Fortunately it was very relevant to the real world and candidates are allowed to refer to the aircraft’s POH/AFM during the exam.

Back when I was doing my PPL, I was pootling around at 90 kt. Not long after getting my licence, I bought a LAA permit to fly homebuilt aircraft and had to get used to something that cruised at 120 kt and that was very slippery. That was quite a change and took some adjustment on my part. So when I started the MEP I thought a 140 kt cruise would not be much of a change. But I soon learned the extra cruise speed combined with the higher speed in the circuit meant that I was behind the aircraft. Add that to the extra complexity of flying retractable and I was well outside my comfort zone. It took me a little while to get my head around the new way of flying. After some initial slow progress I managed to pass the skills test.

The next phase was the IR. This was the bit I was really looking forward to. The training started in a fixed-base simulator (FNPT II). The early lessons were a very good introduction to flying on instruments. We started with flying some “patterns” – lines on a piece of paper with timed legs, rate-one turns, climbs and descents. They got progressively more difficult and each new lesson added some additional level of complexity and started ramping up the workload.

Next, we moved on to single needle tracking. This bit of the course felt a little more like the real world. The earlier pattern flying, while very useful, was slightly abstract. The single needle tracking started to incorporate real navaids. This part was also very interesting and useful in gaining experience of both flying on instruments (i.e. staying the right way up!) and navigating on instruments (i.e. getting where you want to go).

I think I did really well on those first few lessons and I felt like I really got the hang of it. That didn’t last though!

The navigation got progressively more difficult and the workload increased. Setting up the nav radios, identifying the navaids, interpreting the indications and making corrections – doing all that while flying the aircraft was quite a challenge. Take, for example, the innocuous-sounding part about “identifying the navaids”. That sounded straightforward in the briefing. But in the air it’s a matter of finding the right button on the audio panel, listening out for the Morse, comparing the Morse with what’s written on your plog all while maintaining straight and level in IMC, not deviating by more than 5 degrees heading and not by more than 100 ft of assigned level.

Those of you that fly IFR regularly will do all that as second nature. But to a newbie it’s a real challenge. At least, I found it a real challenge. And it’s not helped by the fact that the early part of the IR training is done without autopilot. I completely understand the reason for that. I’m not criticising the course. I’m just saying I found it difficult.

The next skill to master was holds. Having done a bit of single needle tracking earlier, holds made a certain amount of sense. But flying them was a different matter. Calculating the wind corrections on the ground was straightforward but inevitably involved a little guesswork. Flying those corrections in the air, correcting the deviations and calculating new values was a bit of overload. It’s not only the task in hand that occupies your brain capacity. It’s also trying to think one step ahead so that you have planned for your next task. Once I got behind the aircraft, the errors accumulated and were magnified. When something starts going wrong, you have to be on it very quickly to take corrective action. Otherwise things get worse, one error leads to another and before you know it you have gone out of tolerance or missed some vital action.

Eventually holds became easier. But I never felt like I was really on top of them. I never felt completely comfortable. I guess that will come in time with experience.

We then moved on to approaches. Knowing nothing about instrument approaches, in my mind flying an ILS was a simple matter of following some crosshairs down to the ground. Simple. The reality though is a lot more involved. I was surprised to learn that the final approach phase of an instrument approach starts many miles away from the threshold – maybe eight nautical miles away. It has to start that far away in order to get the aircraft established on a stable approach. The base turn will either be achieved by following a procedure or by radar vectors. Make a thirty-degree intercept to the localiser. At half scale deflection report localiser established. Change from approach frequency to tower frequency. Glide slope becomes active. At half scale deflection configure the aircraft for the descent – gear down, approach flap, power set, pitch set for the rate of descent you need (you’ll have calculated what ROD you need already using your anticipated ground speed). Continuously monitor your horizontal and vertical position with respect to localiser and glideslope indications. Make changes in pitch, roll, yaw and power as needed. Make corrections as the wind backs and slacks during the descent. The ILS indications are getting really sensitive now and any small deviation produces what seems like a disproportionately large deviation in indication. At five hundred feet above minima check the gear is down, approach is stable and you have permission to land. Approaching minima, look up, find the runway, runway in sight, continuing, deploy landing flap, slow to Vref. And if it has all gone to plan, you touchdown somewhere near the anticipated point on the runway. But that’s only after many, many hours of practice. The first few of my approaches were not pretty and didn’t end well.

The ILS is only one type of approach, of course. We also did NDB and RNAV. We did a variety of them, most with CDFA but one or two without. We also covered procedure turns, DME arcs, standard instrument departures and arrivals. All-in-all the sim sessions were really comprehensive, very useful but also very intense.

Eventually, I finished the training in the sim. The next bit I was looking forward to even more – real flying. Again, we eased gently into it. The first flight was a bit of general handling on instruments followed by a hold and RNAV approach. Flying the aircraft was different to the sim in one important respect – it moves! I underestimated how much I normally rely on my sensory perception for attitude control. Ignoring my inbuilt sense of which-way-is-up and relying solely on instruments was tricky at first. I overcame that though and we started doing longer and more involved flights. Naturally, the workload increased. It’s not possible to pause a real flight. Nor is it possible to stop other people talking on the radio. And the weather doesn’t abide by the same computational model as the sim. Bizarrely I found hand flying the aircraft easier than it was in the sim. But all the other factors consume any addition capacity you have and I was overloaded during the high workload phases of flight.

We visited several different airports, each with their own different approaches. It surprised me how different each approach was. We did hold after hold, approach after approach, EFATO after EFATO. I didn’t feel like I was making any progress. During the high workload phases of flight, I felt like I was way behind the aircraft. I made mistakes. I missed radio calls. I learnt a lot.

Toward the end of the course, with only a couple of hours left, I felt like I would never achieve the standard. I told my instructor I was finding it hard and asked whether he thought I was wasting my time. He told me I was not far off skills test standard and reassured me by saying “I’ve seen grown men cry over this course”. I held it together but, if I’m honest, I did feel like crying at that point. My frustration was palpable.

After a lot of hard work, the day eventually came for me to take my skills test. It was scheduled late in the day and part of the flight would be conducted during official night. I planned the route. I rehearsed the flight. I planned some more. I prepared a weather briefing. I planned more. I checked NOTAMs. I planned yet more. I filed a flight plan. I even phoned Southend airport to confirm they were using runway 05.

Helmuth von Moltke said “no plan survives contact with the enemy” and pilots have appropriated that and changed it to “no flight plan survives contact with ATC”. And with good reason too. Early on in my skills test flight, I got vectored out into the middle of the English Channel. Predicting this might happen, I had a plan and asked for a routing via DET stating that I was happy to leave controlled airspace in the descent if they could not accommodate. I was slightly surprised to be given a direct to DET.

Along this leg I got Southend’s ATIS, which confirmed runway 05. London Control handed me over to Southend Approach. I made contact and continued my preparation for a radar-vectored ILS approach to runway 05. I heard chatter on the radio, some of which seemed to mention 23. I asked for confirmation of the runway in use and ATC apologised and said they had just changed to runway 23. I frantically got the plate and started a new plate brief. I dialled in the new minima and identified the ILS and DME. Not five minutes later, Approach apologised again and said they were going back to 05. Right, back to the original plate. Dial in the original minima. Ident the ILS again. That doesn’t seem right. The ILS ident should be ISO not IND. I was about to key the mike and ask for confirmation that the ILS was radiating on the correct runway when I noticed the ident change. After ten minutes of intense activity, things settled down for a couple of minutes before the approach. I was vectored to the ILS and established myself on the localiser. I was then asked to fly my minimum safe approach speed because there was an aircraft on the runway about to depart. I configured and started my descent. Despite having worked very hard, I didn’t feel overloaded and managed to fly a reasonable ILS.

At some point in the melee I managed to ask for missed approach instructions for an IFR return to Shoreham via DET at 3000 ft. ATC were kind to me and gave me the simple instruction on the go around to climb straight ahead to 2000 ft until advised. I was prepared for something more complex but that was a welcome bit of simplicity.

As we were leaving Southend the examiner spoke to ATC and we learned that London City was closed. Southend were taking a lot of diverts from there and they had to fit me in among a load of much heavier traffic. So it wasn’t the most straightforward of skills tests but I managed to hold it all together and performed well enough to meet the standard. I was ecstatic when the examiner told me I had passed!

So that’s a little insight into my experience of the IR. I have the rating now and am keen to put it to use. I’m not an experienced instrument pilot but I’m eager to learn about real-world IFR. I’d be lying if I said it was easy. It wasn’t. There were ups and downs (no pun intended), highs and lows. It was frustrating. It was exhilarating. It was hard work. It was a learning experience. It has made me a much better pilot. I learnt a lot about flying and learnt a lot about myself. It was hugely rewarding and has been a real journey.