Instrument Flying

There was a time not so long ago that a single pilot flying hard IFR was considered an accident waiting to happen. There was simply too much going on, conventional wisdom held, for one pilot to handle all alone. Instrument pilots contemplating a flight in actual weather actively sought out others-perhaps an instructor-who could help with the cockpit chores and make sure the dirty side stayed down. Except for the freshest instrument pilots, thats all changed. And good riddance. Ive long been convinced the second most dangerous thing in aviation is two pilots trying to fly the same airplane at the same time (the first is a private pilot with a #2 Phillips screwdriver, but thats a different article). But the idea of single-pilot IFR, or SPIFR, being something to avoid seems to have hung on in some quarters. Sure; theres a time and a place to take along some backup, depending on how comfortable a pilot is with the weather, the airplane and the airspace. But Id argue against making the flight in the first place if the only way youd consider it is with another pilot. Be that as it may, advances in automating the cockpit have paved the way for much more SPIFR than only a decade ago. Thats a good thing, in my opinion, but also means our lone pilot needs to prepare for the flight a bit more than might otherwise be the case.

When departing IFR from a tower-controlled airport, planning your initial route is easy. You may have a challenging departure procedure, but you depart as cleared or as directed, immediately under positive control. It sounds complicated, but its actually easier than the alternative. The alternative, since you asked, is an IFR departure from a non-towered airport. In this case, youre entirely responsible for terrain clearance until you make it into controlled airspace and you must plan an obstacle clearance departure route on your own. Your options (and responsibilities) are different depending on whether its VMC, marginal VFR or IMC. What do you need to consider? How do you choose? If you want to know what youre expected to do under a given set of circumstances, the first place to look is the regs. FAR 91.175 specifies what pilots are required to do for takeoff and landing under IFR. Although 91.175 gives us a lot of good information about landing minima and decision heights, and what needs to be visible to proceed from the missed approach point to landing, it is basically mute on the subject of instrument departures.

When you think about it, the IFR system is really a wondrous thing. For example, every airport, navaid, fix and procedure has certain basic characteristics shared by all other similar facilities. For another example, a unique name or identifier is assigned, helping eliminate confusion between ATC and pilots. To navigate from one to another, the operator requests a route, naming the various facilities to be used. A flight plan is filed, or a radio request is made, a controller compares the request to his or her needs and a clearance is issued. On one level, its a simple system. On another, its incredibly complex. So complex, in fact, errors are found every day by pilots and controllers, and then corrected. The result is a relatively safe and efficient national airspace system. One of the keys to making it all work, however, is pilots and controllers cross-checking each others work. Most of the time, no errors are found. Sometimes, though, someone forgets something, or the system proves too inflexible. In those situations, operators and ATC sit down to figure out what went wrong and develop procedures to consider each others needs. This is my tale of finding an omission in the system, and how little effort it took for a fix to be implemented.

Its been said that experience is what you get when you dont get what you wanted to get. Well, taking significant liberties, a pilot might then say that a deviation is where you go when you dont get to go where you planned to go. Got it? We pilots are typically a robust and determined bunch. We dont like to admit we cant travel our planned route. Once were on our way and it looks like Mother Nature doesnt want us on our planned route, the common technique is to simply go have a look before deciding on a different, longer route. To understand the fallacy in this, lets cover a little basic geometry to see that its better to deviate early for the shortest practical addition to your route while maintaining your sanity and keeping your blood pressure in check with a conservative deviation.

Its morbidly fascinating to look at landing accidents involving pilots who came to grief while shooting an ILS in instrument weather. By contrast, VFR landing accidents tend to involve loss of control after landing, usually a result of too much speed at touchdown. Few VFR landing accidents involve crashing short of the runway itself. Yet, when actual IFR weather moves in and the airplane is on the ILS, the converse occurs, and suddenly pilots develop a proclivity for crashing before ever getting to the runway. As would be expected because an airplane is going far faster prior to the time it touches down than when it is when rolling out, landing accidents when flying the ILS in IFR conditions are more often fatal than landing accidents when flying VFR. The instrument landing system has been around for over a half century. In its own way, it is instrument flyings simple and reliable old boot; the two-needle, three-dimensional approach system that funnels one to a touchdown spot about 1500 feet down a comfortingly long runway. With a time-proven design that guides arriving aircraft over the runway threshold at a safe 50 feet or so, how come so many GA pilots find a way to depart from the friendly confines of the ILS arrival cone and smack into the planet before getting to the runway? Why are so very few GA ILS accidents in IFR of the sort where the airplane overshot the touchdown point and went off the end of the runway as is expected in VFR conditions?

Its nearing dusk as two Piper Senecas descend toward Highfuelprices Regional Airport on vectors for the VOR approach. Published minimums are 500 and 1. The airport has weather reporting and forecasting, the airplanes have the same avionics. Seneca A is being flown by a pilot with commercial, instrument and multi-engine ratings and a current Part 135 approval; the flight is being operated under Part 135 as there is a five-pound box of urgent documents under the cargo net behind the rear seats. Meanwhile, Seneca B is being flown by a pilot with commercial, instrument and multi-engine ratings, a 23-month-old flight review and some question as to whether he is instrument-current. It is a Part 91 flight. There are four passengers on board who are splitting the cost of the flight with the pilot. Before they reach the final approach fix, the controller advises both aircraft that the airport weather is now 400 overcast and mile visibility in rain and mist. Seneca A pilot advises the controller she cannot continue the approach and that shed like to climb 1000 feet or so and hold at the FAF while she decides whether to go to her alternate or wait for the weather to improve. The pilot of Seneca B hears the weather report and continues with the approach because he wants to take a look.

My story involving a glass-panel failure happened with an Avidyne unit. I was at Wick, Scotland, lining up for departure, and suddenly things started failing. First the lower Garmin 430, then the upper one. The transponder quickly followed and by then the PFD looked like a demo poster for what happens when things fail. The great news was that I was on the ground-even without a radio. It turned out the number one alternator and the master control unit had failed. Whether one had caused the other was incidental at that point. In marginal weather, with no radio, only the most basic of flight instruments and no VOR or other electronic guidance? I surely wasnt taking off; being airborne and trying to land would have been harrowing. My handheld GPS had just become my new best friend; Ive double-checked its batteries ever since. Between it and my Sportys handheld nav/com (yes, I keep those batteries fresh, too), I would have had a shot at getting down in one piece. We might carry some backup radios and gadgets, but how prepared are we to deal with major system outages when in the clag? Short of the odd IPC or checkride, how often do we practice for-real panel failures? Why not use everyday flying to stay sharp on partial panel?

I fly a lot of IFR year round and a fair amount of actual IMC during the winter, but not much in the summer. Like everyone else, Ive heard the wakeup call from Center in that unmistakable tone that says, “Were not amused that you think flex-altitudes are in use today…please get back to 5000 feet. Now.” That sort of thing may be a minor mistake, but if you add up enough minor mistakes, youve got a trend and that could lead to something ugly. The 24-month flight review and instrument proficiency checks are supposed to correct the inevitable decline in skill for those of us who dont fly much, but there may be a better way.

When engineers developed the ILS so many years ago, they simultaneously created one of the most reliable and accurate navaids ever. The basic ILS is in use throughout the world and, with appropriate air- and ground-borne hardware, site prep, training and certification, we can use it to fly down to and land without seeing much at all out the windshield. But those engineers couldnt do everything. They couldnt, for example, eliminate the ever-narrowing of the desired course and descent path as we get closer to the runway. They also couldnt eliminate the need to descend in the first place. In the bargain, were “saddled with” a well-understood and predictable means to transition from straight-and-level flight in the terminal area to sitting upright at the airport bar, with a few moments of needle-chasing thrown in for good measure. Like so many things in life and aviation, there are ways to cheat-err, simplify-the ILS. Many pilots-especially those with a newer instrument rating-may not have grasped them yet.

Its an interesting phenomenon: As student pilots, we master VFR traffic patterns in just a few hours. After earning the private, we work on our instrument rating. Initially, nothing is quite so nerve wracking as a difficult approach. Then, our careers progress and we land that big job. IFR becomes old hat-we can shoot that approach without a second thought. In fact, we get so used to “vectors to final” that we get the shakes flying a VFR traffic pattern at a small airport on a nice day-something we mastered thousands of hours ago. What causes this odd reversal and what can we do about it?