IR holders: Would you ever go back to VFR-only and, if so, what would change?

I can understand a German pilot worrying about flying VFR in France and I have heard that sentiment from a number of them.

The more south you go in Europe, the less transparent the system (the whole way of life) becomes.

We, as pilots, have been trained to plan a flight before going flying, and for good reasons. But in much of France the airspace maps are almost impossible to work out, right down to some awful cases (see the D-ESPJ crash thread). Their system works because ATC has a nice connected-up system with great radar coverage and they are accordingly relaxed, but most of all it works because there isn’t much traffic at the relevant levels there (where a CAS bust would actually matter… you can’t do this around Paris). If you transplanted those awful airspace structures to say the UK South East and popped Gatwick and Heathrow in the middle of it, you would have total havoc.

So, the advice given is to live and let live, hang loose, and just fly, and it will be allright on the night. And that works (except where it doesn’t but those cases don’t end up on a forum) but it goes against the grain of those who like to know what they are doing in advance, and what Plan B is. The reality in this case is that there is no Plan B for when ATC don’t clear you into the next sector which you are approaching at 150kt and you are 5nm away. I never got that in France but I got it in Italy, where their ATC is no different to their taxis, buses or trains but again the locals are OK because they know how to work the system, and if there is a problem they turn off the transponder (just relaying what I have from an Italian pilot) I got forced out all the way to the middle of the Adriatic Sea, presumably because if you fly on the Croatia-Italy border nobody cares who you are

There is a lot of detail which a visitor won’t know e.g. when a French ATCO clears you A-B and halfway is an R area, you are supposed to avoid it yourself. How many would know that?

That is one of the many reasons I prefer IFR. In the same way as if I bought a farmhouse somewhere, I would expect to get a good title and a planning permission to tart it up, and not have to worry whether I gave the local mayor a right size case of the right wine. A lot of people prefer the latter but they probably don’t feature heavily in the IR community which needs a fair bit of attention to detail.

On a related topic, pre-EuroGA I did about 10 years on some UK forums and they contained loads of posts from over-2000kg twin pilots saying how they fly VFR everywhere, and how their de-ice system, and a general ability to carry a lot of ice, helps. That’s the flip side of long distance VFR… once you start a flight at say 5000ft and above you is 20000ft of freezing IMC and maybe some nasty convective stuff, you can’t just pop up when you enter IMC and start collecting ice – even if you could get an IFR clearance really fast. Not in a twin and not in a single (short of a TBM etc). You have been snookered into a corner. So you need to really know your stuff, the wx, etc. A hangar mate of mine did that, on his last ever flight, “VFR” in solid IMC, in a nice straight line, all the way to Lyon, before embedding his family in a mountain.

I would have thought that picking up ice is more of an IFR problem than a VFR one, for a variety of reasons, not least because VFR you can manoeuvre at will, both horizontally and vertically, to avoid icing, whereas IFR you have to negotiate each twist and turn.

Yes, but if you are collecting ice then you are in solid IMC and thus aren’t VFR. You are flying a poorly planned IFR flight.

Not a single one of those VFR trips was legal VFR, end to end…

Yes, but there is a difference between doing a bit of cloud here and there, and

controlled and restricted airspace can fall away to show that a straight line is feasible for the whole journey (eg Friedrichshafen to Biggin Hill at the weekend at FL105.)

Obviously you and I know what you mean and what I mean, but I would not just tell somebody with a fresh PPL reading this that flying a straight line at FL105 (which is a prime icing level at any time of the year in N Europe) is fine because some Ipad app says so.

One needs to heavily qualify such statements. Such flights are IFR flights in all but name, needing excellent wx planning (IR images etc), oxygen, or a preparedness to enter IMC and continue illegally and more importantly dangerously (due to icing) for hundreds of miles.

All my long VFR trips were done primarily VMC on top, and usually needing oxygen to stay above icing conditions.

Problems do happen and sometimes result in quite a story, but not often.

True

Some people worry about that, some don’t.