alioth wrote:
if your main IFR frequency is going constantly you’re still not going to be able to hear ATIS unless you turn its volume down (and the equivalent effect is gained on a single radio by swapping monitor/active). Single crew, you’re not going to be on IFR frequency, listening to ATIS and talking to handling even with infinite radios, because you have only one mouth and one pair of ears!
I have been flying single crew, multiple radio, IFR for 40 years and thousands of hours and I don’t recognise your concern. I can listen to two streams with no difficulty.
If you do find it difficult, Garmin do a fantastic audio panel which gives you stereo spread, and that makes the task infinitely easier.
Does anyone have an opinion on the single altimeter vs the previous two requirement?
alioth wrote:
They might do that for an airliner, but I doubt they would for a Cessna 172, especially if it’s squawking lost comm and flying its filed route.
A guy who has a Malibu at my homebase was escorted all the way from the Polish border to Stuttgart by two Tornados a few years ago. He did everything by the book, sqawked what he was supposed to squawk, followed his flight planned route and was even able to contact someone via mobile phone. The Tornados were scrambled anyway. Don’t know who paid for that.
AnthonyQ wrote:
Does anyone have an opinion on the single altimeter vs the previous two requirement?
Personally, I like my second (and third) altimeter. The CAT I minimum of 200 feet is really not a lot and considering that the altimeter is allowed to be off by 60ft, this can bring one’s terrain clearance down to 140ft – legally. A faulty altimeter might not leave much space between the ground and me… The same when flying level between traffic.
In the US, most SEP GA has been flying IFR for many decades. It’s mostly just Euro-CAA gold-plating which is now coming to an end.
Also, minimum equipment requirements must always be very low, because they are minimum requirements. Everybody who wants to have more equipment can chose to do so.
Let me see:
What else do we need to be safe – perhaps a radar altimeter, and (of course) a spare? And some of us had better add an echo-sounder for water-skiing 
No reason why one decent GPS/COM/ILS box with terrain, one transponder, electric standby attitude, six pack or glass should meet most safety standards. As Europe doesn’t allow overlays we still get accidents where one of the causes is substituting GPS for DME without reading the plate. With overlay this should not occur as it is taken care of in the GPS approach database.
The weakest link after the pilot is the electric system, so having triple com or NAV redundancy without dual electrics and split buses is a spurious safety blanket, unless your avionics are mid seventies vintage.
I quite like the idea one one radio and one altimeter
Then if I have a com box failure i would at least be legal to get home or get to maintenance using com 2.
Nothing worse then being grounded at some regional interglacial spaceport that has 3 movements a day but your avionics man not allowed to bring a volt meter to the aircraft to fixit. Or a replacement nav/com for that matter.
what_next wrote:
Don’t know who paid for that.
Well, you did.
Airborne_Again wrote:
This looks to me like another case of security theater.
They’re not necessarily doing it because they think you might attack someone. They’re sometimes doing it to make you visible to ATC.
So safety theatre, perhaps 
Peter wrote:
So I don’t think they would do an interception on a C172 with a jet.
Then you should refresh the procedures for interception, mandatory stuff I believe
I think the thing has always been about redundancy. Today transponders are mandatory for instance, which is not a full parallel redundancy, but enough backup in case radio or alt is lost. Seems to me there are more practical reasons to have two radios, and a radio isn’t that expensive compared with a €500k IFR machine.
