One of the instrument rating’s dirty little secrets that no one tells you about until it’s too late is the amount of recurrent training you need to legally fly IFR after the checkride. The details—along with options and potential loopholes—are in FAR 61.57, Recent flight experience: Pilot in command, portions of which we all know by heart. If you don’t regularly fly instruments and log approaches in either simulated or actual conditions, your currency soon will lapse and, eventually, the only way to get it back is via an instrument proficiency check (IPC). After our currency lapses, most of us will need some brush-up to even get through the IPC, which can mean multiple flights, and greater expenditures of time and money.
When pilots think about practicing instrument approaches, we often get hung up on needing a safety pilot before using a view-limiting device. In the middle, hopefully, of a pandemic, finding a qualified person to ride shotgun can be even more challenging than it was before, or will be again. But there are ways to simulate instrument conditions in an actual airplane that minimize the need for a safety pilot. No; there’s no app that eliminates the need for a safety pilot, but there are many things we can do in our everyday flying or in dedicated training that can make safety pilots relatively rare.
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