That's a bad potentially bad situation. I don't know about other pilots, but it takes me a while to stabilize in IMC: at first, if I let my attention lapse, I have 10 degree heading drifts, 100 ft altitude excursions, etc., but after a half hour or so my scan settles and becomes automatic, and then the flying is almost as easy as VMC.
As I approached Toronto in cloud, they told me to expect the LOC/DME B approach, a circling, non-precision approach over water (the most dangerous kind of approach), and one that I had never flown before: in fact, I've never flown any circling approach before in real IMC. Furthermore, the controller was almost at his limit trying to juggle four of us -- three twins and me -- on the same approach. He (kindly) put me ahead of the faster twins but almost vectored me through the LOC before turning me hard inbound, and then I had to push the throttle to full to keep my speed up (I'm used to that part from flying at a busy airport in Ottawa).
Despite all of that, the approach was a complete non-event. I broke out at 900 ft AGL, spotted the airport from two miles back, slowed to 70 kt as late as I could, circled to runway 26, and landed. It was comfortable and non-stressful because I had flown that approach in FlightGear a couple of times last year, even though I'd never done it in real life. The Toronto islands even came out of the fog in real life the way that they did in FlightGear.
Our application is an impressive piece of work: thanks to everyone involved.
All the best,
David
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