> He felt that to fly near minimums > you needed to be flying on a daily basis, even though you can maintain > certification without doing anything like that.
I think he is oversimplifying. You can easily do minimums, at night and in completely smooth air and stratus clouds, at your home airport where you've memorized the entire approach over the years, in any case. Doing minimums in stratocumulus for bumps and rain, just below freezing level for risk of ice, at an approach you've never seen, without radar support, and tired because you're actually commuting for work purposes, is another thing. The latter situation is why airlines have to use very highly trained crews of two or three people. The workload goes up _very_ fast. > Basically he looks for high ceilings (2500ft or higher) You always need to have good ceilings when you set out, partly because many of the factors that convert an easy approach into a hard one are not apparent from the remote weather information without local knowledge. > It is interesting hearing different takes on this. > My feeling is that when I > get my license it'll be imperitive to get the instrument rating Other than dual training flights, where we specifically go looking for cloud and select approaches for bad conditions that are still safe, I've had entire IFR cross countries that would have been impossible without a clearance but I never ended up inside a cloud or the like. Stacked sandwiches of cloud layers and/or puffy fields of clouds are impassable VFR, both due to the risk of the holes filling in with cloud and due to the VFR-cloud-separation rules filling in the holes as well. It might be interesting to have a code fragment that monitors the actual visual conditions of the simulation and reports a violation when you penetrate the IFR protected airspace around the clouds or proceed into visibilities below VFR for the altitude and class. The distinction between VFR, VMC, IFR, IMC is especially apparent there. If you're too close to clouds for VFR, you have to be IFR. However, you can easily see where you're going so you are in VMC. Therefore, you cannot log IMC and the time you're spending on clearance does not count. Even when I hit cloud on a clearance, it is often less than 0.1 logged (i.e. 6 minutes) because a wall of cloud is often under 10 miles wide (and a C172RG cruises at 139 knots) or a layer of cloud is often under 4000 ft thick (and a non-precision stepdown is usually about 800ft/min; cruise climb is 700ft/min at low altitudes). > ...especially > the way the weather in Maine is. As David comments below, if you have embedded ice, freezing rain, thunderstorms, wind shear, unpredictable ceilings below, etc etc ... an IFR clearance is absolutely useless for General Aviation flight. Florida is the standing joke of a place where an IFR rating is the ticket to death, because it lets you go into the cloud and accidentally fly smack into a thunderstorm, whereas the VFR pilot, scud-running underneath, can see the rain coming out of the bottom of the cloud and take a different route. As an aside, for people wanting to fly VMC in interesting weather, it is important (as I've mentioned before) to implement the life cycle of a thunderstorm as different 3D models that FGFS cycles through. Pilots have to recognize the early stages that look safe and stay away because, by the time they've flown up to that cloud, it will have graduated into something dangerous. > You still won't > want to fly in actual when there's a chance of embedded TCU or CB, > unless you have a Strikefinder or Stormscope on board -- I'd fly in > that case only if I were assured of being well above the cloudtops, so > that I could see any exciting stuff coming. Yup, or below (terrain permitting). In recent months, the magazine "Flying" (free with membership in the Natl Assn of Flight Instructors) has been contrasting GA grade radar and GA grade strikefinding equipment and come to the conclusion that you need both to avoid nasty surprises in the vicinity of thunderstorms. Either on its own has subtle limits due to which an area will look safe until you're too close to leave. > that -10 to +1 Celsius band that's especially scary, and that's when I > really don't want to spend much time in cloud or precip (that's also > why the Outside Air Temperature [OAT] gauge is such an important > instrument, and one that we need to add to our FlightGear panels). The San Diego winters put freezing level around 6000 ft, conveniently at the usual altitude for coastal IFR of light aircraft (forcing everybody to stay slightly lower than usual), selected such that you cannot climb over the coastal mountain range through cloud (forcing everybody to look for holes to climb through). The OAT starts to control your altitude choices and is probably the largest reason for requesting changes to assigned clearances. However, the OAT instrument is often not mounted in the panel and is instead located in one of the overhead air vents. Unless you're using the 3D cockpit, that region is not normally in a FGFS display window. This leaves the obvious question of where we should show OAT data. _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
