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IFR practice flights

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I am starting to get worried as my IFR-equipped aircraft is currently grounded, and it’s been 5 months and not a single IFR segment for me. I could certainly go to my favourite FTO and book a few hours with or without an instructor, but I wonder if anyone can propose a more cost-effective way. I have a few general ideas – any specific recommendations or offers on these will be greatly appreciated:
- Take an MCC course and gain an extra qualification while exercising my IFR skills – would it work this way?
- Join someone on a multi-day IFR trip (I can easily travel on a short notice)
- Take simulator training for a considerably faster aircraft, so that going back to real-life 80-knot approaches would be a no-brainer
- Find a reasonably priced FTO based directly at an IFR airport
Thanks everyone!

LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

You can keep the procedural skills up by using X-Plane at home. Other than that, try to find a reasonably priced IFR equipped rental. No idea how easy that is where you are, but a possibility could be to look at places in Austria (Wels?) that are not too far from your base.

172driver wrote:

You can keep the procedural skills up by using X-Plane at home.

I second that!

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

Nice discussion as I m starting IFR rating soon; I have some basic knowledge so far, but I don’t know which kind of exercise I can do with xplane to get a bit proficient in advance. Any idea?

LFMD, France

X-Plane is indeed one of the solutions I am considering. While we are at it, does anyone know a GPS simulator in X-Plane that can be controlled from a touchscreen (that is, without keyboard and mouse)? Standard GNS430 and G1000 are virtually impossible to control without a mouse.

LKBU (near Prague), Czech Republic

@greg_mp X-Plane is a great tool to practice the various IFR maneuvers, e.g. approaches, holds, DME arcs, etc. It will not teach you how to fly an airplane! It will also teach you how to set up the cockpit for IFR flight. I found it very helpful during my IR training.

@Ultranomad I think there are a few – expensive – hardware solutions out there, but perhaps get in touch with this guy https://cessna172sim.allanglen.com/docs/avionics/garmin-gns-430/ who seems to have hacked the issue. That said, you can run X-Plane with a yoke and rudder and control the instruments with a mouse at the same time. A bit of a pain, but doable.

In general, you’ll deffo need a yoke/throttle quadrant assembly (there are several on the market, depending a bit on your platform, Mac or PC) and ideally also a rudder pedal assembly. Both these things can be bought quite cheaply on Ebay.

If you have ForeFlight, you can link this on your iPad to X-Plane and ‘fly’ the approaches with the real charts and plates. These flights then show up in the track logs of FF. And here comes the best part – you can then export these track logs to a little program called CloudAhoy which lets you analyze your flight in great detail. This also works with the track logs of real flights. It’s a fantastic tool also to stay current – you see all (and I mean all) your mistakes.

https://realsimgear.com/collections/avionics-components/products/realsimgear-gns430-bezel-for-x-plane-realistic-gps-for-your-sim

I’m intending to order one of these to use with Xplane, immediately on completion of the IR theory.
I expect the carriage/import from the states to sting a little but from research it seems to be relatively well developed, reliable and realistic in operation.

United Kingdom

One more thing: to make full use of X-Plane as IFR trainer, you also need to buy and download the full database for the 430/530. One vendor is here.

The answer to the touch screen is the Reality-XP GTN. It is superb.

EGKB Biggin Hill

For the G1000 option, a slightly more expensive option, using an iPad with a a special bezel;
https://www.simionic.net/WordPress/shop/shb1000bezel-for-ipad-sample

(No personal experience)

EHLE, Netherlands
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