This is mostly a collection of articles about the various phases of instrument flight with some additional information thrown in.
This is still a “work in progress” – last updated 3/29/04.
Instrument Flying “Rules”
Here are some rules for instrument flying:
- Do everything you can do on the ground before you start flying.
By which I mean have all the radios setup, if you have a GPS or other system that accepts flight plans, have your flight plan loaded. If you’re taking off into IMC have the navigation aids for the instrument approaches at you departure airport or takeoff alternate loaded.
- If you’re not doing something, find something to do.
If you’re sitting back relaxing thinking how easy this instrument flying has become, stop, and find something to do. Brief or review the expected approach at your destination. Make sure you know where you are, i.e. your “backup” navigation agrees with you primary navigation sources. There’s always something to do. If you’ve checked and double-checked everything and you’ve still run out of thing to do then congratulations, instrument flying really has become easy.
- Make everything in the panel work for a living.
Somebody paid a lot of money for the equipment installed in the panel of the plane you’re flying. If you own the plane it was you. Make sure it’s all working for you. If you have 2 COMM radios make sure you have a weather source or the emergency frequency available. Put something else, Flight Watch perhaps, in the stand-by frequency. Try to anticipate the next communication frequency and have that setup in your primary COMM radio stand-by. Always have “backup” navigation sources loaded in your NAV radios and keep the next anticipated navigation source loaded as stand-by. Use the ADF to track nearby NDBs as backup for your VOR or GPS navigation. Make sure you know what every piece of equipment in the plane is doing for you, and if it’s not doing anything useful at the moment, find something for it to do.
Instrument Flight Planning
As pilot’s we constantly and consistently use checklists in the cockpit, or at least we should be, so why not use checklists for planning a flight to make sure we’ve covered all the necessary elements. Here an example of an IFR Flight Planning checklist.
Before every flight we have to decide if the weather is satisfactory for us to fly and complete the flight. Different pilots will have different weather minimums as well as different definitions of “completing” a flight. We all have to make the weather decisions and here’s a discussion of weather items to include in planning a flight in IMC.
Instrument Departure
Getting a Clearance
Setup On The Ground
It’s much easier to set radios, load flight plans etc. on the ground than in the air. Especially in the initial stages of an instrument flight. Let’s face it, most of us don’t fly in IMC enough to make it a routine occurrence, so we should strive to reduce the workload as much as possible in the early stages of the flight.
Make sure you’ve got all the navigation equipment setup, including GPS flight plans, so that when you receive an ATC clearance to join your flight planned route you can easily determine how to do that and execute the plan. The early stages of climb out as you enter wet and bumpy clouds is no time to realize you don’t have the GPS programmed yet. If you’re departing an uncontrolled field and need to follow an obstacle departure procedure then your very life may depend on being able to navigate your way from point to point until you can join the relative safety of “radar contact”.
Cruise Flight
Cruise flight is an excellent time to brief the approach.
Instrument Arrival
Vectors
Most of the time on the East Coast of the US we’re going to get vectors to final. Not always, in some of the remote regions of what we call mountains the people out West call lumps and perhaps on the extremities of various coastal regions we’ll need to fly a full approach, but mostly we’ll get vectors.
In cruise we briefed the approach and loaded our avionics with much of the information we’ll need, but we still needed to use some of the avionics to navigate en-route. As soon as the controller gives you your first heading to fly it’s time to finish up the approach setup. This is probably as easy as moving the primary navigation aid from the stand-by to the active part of your navigation radio and perhaps activating the GPS approach, either as backup or as the primary approach navigation.
We don’t want to lose situational awareness so we’ll still be using some of our navigation tools to keep an eye on where the controller has us heading, but our primary goal is to get setup to fly the approach.
You should be close enough now to identify all the appropriate navigation aids and we should be within 30 miles of our destination so the GPS should have transitioned to terminal mode.
The controlled can still throw us a curve ball, maybe they vectored for some reason not related to approach or maybe they still haven’t fully absorbed the training on GPS approaches. So the controlled may still suddenly drop a “cleared to XX fix” on you. This is where we need our situational awareness and for those people lucky enough to have a GPS we also need to adept enough with the unit to be able to quickly load and fly direct to a fix. Chances are good the fix is loaded in our flight plan somewhere so we shouldn’t have to spin the dials through each individual letter of the the fix, but sometimes not, sometimes we’ve got to do things the hard way. That’s the downside of filing /G, controllers will expect you to be able to fly to any random point at the drop o a hat, make sure you know how to do that.
Flying the Approach
Flying an approach is pretty much just a case of flying the needles.