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Alot to process

Asked by: 4719 views General Aviation, Private Pilot

Ive started my IFR training, ive heard many complain saying its hard  and alot of information, i try not to mentalize  or think the same on the hard part  but i do agree on the information part.Sometimes i feel like im going crazy with all the terms and procedures and theory.How do you guys do it ? Retain  all the information , any help at all would be greatly appreciated .

4 Answers



  1. John D. Collins on Mar 15, 2011

    Hang in there.  It will all come together.  It makes more sense once you see the overall picture.  Most of what you have to learn is not arbitrary, but has a reason.  You should feel free to ask why something is done a particular way.  Practice makes all the difference in the world.  If you are like most of us, when you first learned to land, it took all your concentration and help from your instructor. I would bet you would say that final approach is only 15 or twenty seconds long.  Later as your experience grew, you might even get  bored on what was actually a few minutes of the final approach.

     

    Practice, practice, practice.  Even after you get your instrument rating and understand the system much better, you still will need to do recurrent training and fly regularly to maintain your hard learned new skills.

     

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  2. Wes Beard on Mar 16, 2011

    Topflight,
     
    There is quite a lot of information out there that needs to be understood for IFR flight.  I was also overwhelmed a long time ago when I was learning about the system.  With that said, I found that once I got to flying IFR all the time that most of the book knowledge was good to know but not always used.  There is definitely a difference between the book work and the practicality of flying IFR.  Some may disagree and that is OK.
     
    For example, remember the dimensions of the service volumes of VOR’s or NDB’s?  Undoubtedly, it is quite useful to know when planning an IFR trip from VOR to VOR, but there are other ways to get to your destination and ATC (at least where I live) won’t give you a clearance like that.  The practicality of that information is almost useless especially since we know that if there is a defined route from that VOR where the change over point is greater than the service volume the FAA guarantees navigational coverage on that route.  What range of frequencies can a localizer use?  Useful to know, yes but has very little practical use as the localizer frequencies are listed on each approach plate.
     
    A lot of ground school items are extremely important to remember.  The first thing that comes to my mind is what to do if the radios fail in flight under IMC conditions.  How to copy clearances quickly and effectively.  The importance of minimum crossing altitudes and minimum reception altitudes.  When to use the minimum safe altitude and errors associated with the compass if shooting a partial panel approach.
     
    Other information is very practical but is never quite in the ground studies.  For example, we know that a 3 degree glide is 314 feet per nautical mile.  It would be quite useful if the pilot could determine if they are close to the 3 degree glide while on a non precision approach.  The rule of thumb is 300′ for every nautical mile.  So if you are 10NM from the airport runway, you should be approximately 3000′ AGL.  The European countries are ahead of us Americans in this regard.  They publish these right on the approach plates.  It will show a chart with a DME distance and an altitude.  The pilot would want to be at that altitude when the DME reads that distance.  Unfortunately, it really is talked about in the instrument ground school.
     
    My advice is to learn all you can about flying instruments and take a lot of real world IFR / IMC flights to see how other pilots put that information to use in the system.

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  3. Earl Kessler on Mar 16, 2011

    Reminds me of the saying “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time”  The Instrument Rating is the most difficult of all of the ratings and one of the most important.  Take your time and stay immersed.  Study as much as you can and ask questions.  Remember, we spend a lifetime learning aviation and when you feel you know it all, it changes.  It is just like learning to make a good landing, patience is the watch word.  Most of all, don’t be in a hurry.  Your safety is too important to rush it.  We all hit learning plateaus and persistence will help you plow through to then next level.

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  4. Jackie Lynn on Mar 21, 2011

    My instructor asked me the same question, “how do u eat an elephant?” And I responded by saying, “well, It all depends on how you like your meat cooked!” Iknowiknow its not funny…

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