My Top 5 Favorite IFR Tips You Can Implement Today

what's up guys Charlie from airplane Academy today the weather sucks frankly so we're filming a video inside and we're going to be covering five really practical tips that I hope will help you become more proficient and definitely more confident instrument pilot these are five of my favorite tips that have ever been given to me five in particular is my favorite one that 5th one so let's dive right in tip number one is to be ahead of the airplane at all times so much of instrument flying is about task saturation and cockpit management there can be a lot of things going on particularly when you can't see outside the airplane it's so procedurally based that it's easy to get overwhelmed and one of the easiest ways to combat this is to simply be ahead of the airplane that means in your head be expecting what is going to be the next phase of flight what do I need to be doing to prepare for that etc you just really need to be several steps ahead of the airplane particularly the bigger airplanes you fly the more you even need to be ahead of it because things happen fast one of the areas that this really helped me in training was I used to really struggle with getting cleared for approaches for some reason that was something that always threw me for a loop because it seemed like the air traffic control transmissions were really easy until they cleared me for an ILS and usually what they was would look like coming back into Addis an airport where I was trading is that they were gonna give you an intercept angle and altitude to hold and they're gonna tell you where you were from the fix and all this information and clearly for approach and for some reason that felt really really overwhelming to me because I felt like three paragraphs of information you just be going along and they'd say hey you know now I'm on six Delta Foxtrot you're three miles from Jaret maintain three zero zero in 2100 till established you're cleared ILS three three approach like whoa hello you know we gotta slow down a little bit but as I started to try to be ahead of the aircraft every time I was coming back into land after a lesson I knew we were gonna you know fly some approach and if we're flying the ILS there probably gave me some sort of intercept I knew this was coming and so as I started just to be a little bit more ahead of the airplane and if I knew we were getting vectors to final on our pro then they were going to give me an intercept in the clearance right so suddenly I started expecting an intercept angle and an altitude and a clearance and instructions right and so when you start to hear that you're not as rattled by it when you're expecting it so again just really try to be thinking ahead of the airplane in all phases of flight particularly when it comes to air traffic control that's going to help you be a lot more confident but just try to really be ahead of the airplane tip number two is to train at night and this is as much a practicality as is a safety measure so when I got my instrument rating I did pretty much all of it like 90 plus percent at night and this was just purely out of function for me because I had a daytime job I'd work all day and then I was able to train at night and go do instrument flying because there's no regulation about nighttime versus daytime operations whereas when you're getting your private and your commercial it's pretty much has to be done all it all during the day because there's visual maneuvers etc etc but for IFR you can do it all at night if you want you can do in the middle of the night if you want and when the weather is bad all the better because you get to go do actual IFR so if you're struggling to figure out how you're gonna have the hours to do your instrument rating think about doing at night if you're in a situation that allows for that that was a super useful tool for me that I could just go there after work and work on my training but also from a safety perspective if you can get some night training either while you're getting your instrument rating or then after you've been rated or if you're flying with a safety pilot I think flying at night IFR is super helpful because while it technically isn't any different than flying of the day because you can't see outside right I think there's a mental shift where you know you start to add up all these factors not necessarily risk factors but just elements of the flight that might get in your head as a pilot it's just another factor right so daytime flying versus nighttime flying it's not very much harder but it's just different right so if you're not used to flying at night and then you find yourself in an IFR situation and the Sun Goes Down and now it's night IFR and you've never flown night IFR you really want to be able to have some reps flying at night honestly I think it's easier because the cockpit is pretty dark and you can just focus on the instruments I really really enjoyed it maybe that's because at the time that's all I ever knew because I was doing it all at night but I found it really enjoyable but it's a practical measure and it's also a big time safety measure so fly at night if you can tip number three is to try to figure out some pitch and power settings of your aircraft again IFR is so much about task saturation and a lot of moving pieces in the cockpit so we want to try to do everything at our disposal to reduce the amount of things that our brain is processing and one of the times that it's going to be the most task saturated is going to be while you're flying the final approach because you're you're changing altitude you're trying to maintain your airspeed you're looking to see if you come out of imc you're thinking about the missed approach procedure etc etc I mean that is when all the actions happening and so a kind of a hack that I've found has really been to memorize some power settings to get your desired descent rate so for me and my 182 and it's gonna be different for everybody I fly about 14 inches of manifold pressure on the final approach and that gives me about 90 knots and 4 to 500 feet per minute descent with 10 degrees of flaps so it's one less thing I have to think about that I mean I'm still gonna have to manage airspeed and make small adjustments but in general that's my target so I'm not not having to really think too much about I'm approaching the final approach fix okay now what am I gonna do what's that transition gonna be I mean you kind of turn into a procedure and you can't even write it down if you want to where you know okay this is what I'm going to do this is going to give me my desired descent rate etc so in a Cessna I've heard about 2,100 Cessna 172 2,100 RPMs could be a good setting again for me in the 182 it's 14 inches manifold pressure it's different for everybody so try to find some sort of pitch and power setting and at least get a starting point and then you can refine it next time you're flying an approach figure out was it 14 inches was it 2,100 RPMs we don't what what was it and then give yourself a starting point so instead of having to make big swings in the amount of power you're using to find that airspeed and that descent rate you can at least have a starting point and then you're only changing it maybe a couple inches of manifold sure maybe a few hundred rpms you're not doing these wild swings so that's gonna be a really helpful shortcut if you can hone that in for your aircraft tip number four is that you can disagree with air traffic control now depending on your background before you got into instrument flying you might have been doing a lot of flying that involved air traffic control or this might be a brand-new thing to you but either way I think is instrument pilots sometimes we can get in the habit of just obeying whatever air traffic control says to us because they're giving us vectors and they're giving us a lot of instructions and there's just a lot of back-and-forth there whereas it wasn't as ATC heavy in our VFR days right and so it can be easy to just get in the habit of assuming that they're correct and you don't want to speak up if you see something wrong but I think it's really really good to build the habit of inventory what they're telling you and make sure that that goes in line with the safety of the flight if they're giving something that feels wrong or they're turning you you know the wrong way and inbound traffic or they're giving you a vector into a storm cloud that you know you can see but they can't you really have to speak up because they're humans they make mistakes also even just a couple weeks ago I was getting a really weird vector onto an approach and I had I'd spoke up and he said hath out you're flying different approach I said hey you know check the tape that I requested a different approach so we weren't on the same page but it's good for me to speak up and say hey you're giving me kind of weird vector here or you're clearing me to do a fix that's not even on my approach you need to be able to speak up don't just kind of go along with it those guys are really really good but even though they will tell you that they make mistakes and we're all just trying to have a safe flight so make sure that you are thinking about what air traffic control is telling you and deciding if that is in the best interest for the safety of the flight if something doesn't feel right speak up it's okay to disagree with air traffic control and so tip number five has to do with copying down IFR clearances now I actually put a whole separate video on this tip and how to implement it and I'm going to link it right up here in the corner but the short version is is that IFR clearances can sometimes be intimidating to copy down because controllers sometimes are just trying to see how fast they can possibly read that's just kind of how how it goes and if you don't know what to expect it can be really terrifying to write down a bunch of gibberish so the short version is that you can learn what to expect so you're not having to write everything down as fast as they're talking and then you can also come up with shorthand for yourself so that you're not having to write verbatim what they're saying and write full words you can come up with some of your own short codes where you can copy down full-length words or phrases or instructions trim down to sometimes single letters or just symbols or things like that so go watch that video I think it's going to help I mean gosh once once I kind of learned to implement that I mean copying ifr clearances got super easy and I wasn't ever scared of it ever again but the first time you're starting to learn how to do that can be pretty scary so those are my favorite tips that I've gotten as an IFR pilot there's a ton more we've got an article linked down in the description we're actually list my favorite 16 but out of those 16 these were my favorite five so I hope they help if you've got another thing that really helped you as an instrument pilot and something that you would love to share then I'd love to see you in the comments and hear about it then so this weekend hopefully we're going to fly and get to go film it as the weather gets better but until then I hope you guys will hit subscribe so you don't miss any future content we're coming out with so till then see you guys in the next video

Channel: Airplane Academy

Views: 24,900

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Id: nM86vWSASzs

Length: 10min 20sec (620 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020