I work at a University where things are a little relaxed in the summer and had planned to do the IR flight training over 2 months this summer (I did the first 3.5 hours a few months back). After a long, five-figure first annual, the money I had earmarked for the IR training has been somewhat eaten into. I’m left with the decision of whether to plough ahead using up some real-life reserves, or take a more gentle approach and do it over the next 12 months with a very low intensity between October and April due to work and weather.
I did the PPL in the minimum hours by doing it five days a week over a summer, where the average is much higher for irregular flyers. I’m just wondering if it would be the same with IR. If I’m going to have to do an extra 20 hours to be test-ready by going the ‘one lesson a week route’ then I might as well just bite the bullet and do it over the summer. Should also be noted that I only have around 90 hours TT so there might be an argument for getting some more VFR experience alongside a slower paced IR training schedule. Any advice welcome!
Are you training in your own aircraft? An IR can be done in six weeks but the constraint is instructor availability – you shouldn’t need 20 hours additional training if you stretched it out over 6 to 12 months, as long as you increase the intensity of training for the last ten hours. Don’t skimp on simulator time because you have your own aircraft – getting good practice right is easier in the SIM. Owner pilots invariably want to do all their training in their own aircraft, and the finished product is not as solid as if they had taken the time to ensure basic IF and approaches is learned first in a good SIM.
Robert does this for a living, but my recommendation would be to do the IR as one intensive flying block. You will build currency fast and will come out very good. I did my FAA IR that way (2 weeks, 2 flights per day) and it was the only way I could have passed the bloody hard checkride at the end of it.
Spreading stuff out is why most people take a year to do their PPL, while spending almost 1.5x more on it than they should have done.
Yes sorry i will be doing it in my Mooney and can’t do any sim time because the ATO only has an FNPTII and SEIR students can’t log those hours towards the rating. Guess I’ll just work with x-plane to fine tune things in the background!
Looking at my logbook, it took 1 month and 2 days to do 50h23m towards IR. It’s nice to be current and fly day after day. Just confirm your instructor’s availability.
I can just confirm what others say, do it in one block during summer. I did my own IR from late December until early April (20 hour in FNPT1, 30h in club aircraft), and that was during the winter months with a number of cancelled flights due to WX (southern Sweden). It will probably be cheaper as well as you can do it in the minimum hours.
I would also suggest to do it in one go as intensively as you can afford. I tried spreading it out and every lesson was then halfway spent recapping and getting back up to speed before you could learn anything new. I ended up doing one of those 11-day cramming things in the end, and that was right for me.
As mentioned in my earlier post, I was told that I couldn’t credit FNPTII time to SE-IR. However, I was browsing Part FCL and I found this:
A single-engine IR course shall comprise at least 50 hours instrument time under instruction of
which up to 20 hours may be instrument ground time in an FNPT I, or up to 35 hours in an FFS or
FNPT II. A maximum of 10 hours of FNPT II or an FFS instrument ground time may be conducted in an
FNPT I.
There’s no way that can be interpreted as anything other than permission to credit up to 35 hours of FNPTII time towards the 50 hours needed for the SE-IR rating, right?
zuutroy wrote:
There’s no way that can be interpreted as anything other than permission to credit up to 35 hours of FNPTII time towards the 50 hours needed for the SE-IR rating, right?
This is my reading of your text as well…
Just asked the school for clarification and apparently their FNPT II is certified for multi-training only. D’oh.
