For career instructors it incredibly difficult to obtain 200hours ifr and thus meet the requirements to teach for the ir (and thus actually earn enough money to eat).
Its also maddenly frustrating that your average airline pilot logs huge amount of ifr time sat above cloud on the autopilot and meets the requirements relatively quickly.
The majority of instructors will take every opportunity to log IFR time so when teaching the ppl/cpl instrument portion they will try and do it inactual ifr conditions. Ocourse the uk imc rating makes this easier.
My 248 hours of ifr time obtained over 25 years are all time in actually imc conditions. Logged in class g and class D airspace. All hand flown in aircraft with as little equipment as a vor or an adf.
Surely, you can log IFR time if flying IAW IFR which you can do in VMC, Class G – in the UK, anyway 
Am I right that currently IFR time is relevant only towards the IRI? Everything else is “instrument time” which I log as time in actual IMC (have about 150hrs, out of a TT of 2100).
To be honest Peter I don’t understand it. I’ve always logged time spent on instruments in imc and I’ve never had any problems when I did my iri.
I certsinly know of people who have gone back through there logbook and written that flights were flown vfr but in accordance with ifr and then counted them towards an iri course.
Bathman wrote:
For career instructors it incredibly difficult to obtain 200hours ifr and thus meet the requirements to teach for the ir (and thus actually earn enough money to eat).
Maybe. But that doesn’t give anyone the right to cheat. The original poster is from Germany. Here, pre and post EASA, IFR time could and can only be logged on flights performed under instrument flight rules (with the sole exception of those 30 or 40 hours on the procedure trainer during one’s own training). Nothing else counts. The higher pay for IFR instructors derives from the fact that there are fewer of them. Already now, since the required number of IFR hours has been lowered from 800 (which I had to have before staring the IRI course) to only 200, we see a sharp rise in the number of IR instructors. Very soon there will be no reason to pay them any better than PPL instructors. And certainly the pay of PPL instructors will not be raised to the level of IR instructors…
Peter wrote:
Am I right that currently IFR time is relevant only towards the IRI? Everything else is “instrument time”
Many employers want to see a certain number of IFR hours, but apart from that they are really only required to gain an IR instructor rating. On the other hand, 75 hours of “instrument time” (which traditionally nobody cares to log around here) are required for unfreezing one’s ATPL.
I didn’t say it did or feel that is the case. But it does get my goat that airline pilots can log it so quickly when I reality they are quite clearly in vmc and the autopilot is handling the aircraft.
Pre easa the UK was a bit more pragmatic with the regulations stating something like 200 hours on ifr or 50 hours on instruments.
Certainly in my neck of the woods their is no over supply of iri in fact it’s the opposite there is a chrome ic shortage and with the speed at which instructors are moving onto airline jobs at present I can only see that getting worse.
Bathman wrote:
But it does get my goat that airline pilots can log it so quickly when I reality they are quite clearly in vmc and the autopilot is handling the aircraft.
I know what you mean… I did my own IR instructor course with a group of pilots/instructors two of which were long-haul airline pilots. They had accumulated their 800 hours IFR in a year doing less than 100 flights… Myself, I needed three or four years for it flying piston twins in all-year, all-weather operations with next to no pay, unreliable equipment, poorly performing autopilots (if at all)… But so it goes.
Bathman wrote:
Certainly in my neck of the woods their is no over supply of iri in fact it’s the opposite there is a chrome ic shortage and with the speed at which instructors are moving onto airline jobs at present I can only see that getting worse.
I don’t see that here. During the last 3 years, maybe more, almost every unemployed pilots has gotten himself an instructor rating, many of them with IR. The number of students on the other hand has dropped significantly. My dear instructor colleagues are more busy now hunting for each other’s students than actually teaching them anything.
Peter wrote:
Am I right that currently IFR time is relevant only towards the IRI? Everything else is “instrument time” which I log as time in actual IMC (have about 150hrs, out of a TT of 2100).
FI wanting to instruct for EIR/ IR, IRI, IRE, in case you want to get credit based on foreign IR (for EIR or CB IR), EIR revalidation, conversion of national licences. You might also need to track IFR approaches and departures for crediting of IR proficiency check.
The logbook provided in the corresponding AMC/ GM has a column for IFR flight time, but doesn’t have one for instrument (flight) time (you have to use remarks). It’s only a soft law, but NAA might insist you log IFR flight time (the regulation gives them the power).
