Jeremy Zawodny has started ground school where he’ll learn IFR theory for his instrument rating. The fun bit is that he’s posting about it on his blog and plans to keep doing so. This is great, from my point of view.

I’d like to get my instrument rating. It’s something I keep putting off, because I want to get more experience first and because I actually like flying VFR. Cliff has his instrument rating and his route planning always looks to me like a dot-to-dot problem rather than a navigational process. But it’s the next obvious thing to do and it sure would be nice to be able to fly in and out of Málaga, who ban VFR flights at the weekend.

If I go for the accelerated IFR program in the US where Cliff did his, then I’m expected to do all the reading before I arrive. That’s a pretty heavy load and quite frankly I’ve doubted my ability to get through it. But Jeremy is doing the reading as a part of a 10-week course which actually gives me a schedule. Reading his views and the comments from his readers each week makes it feel less like I’m learning in a vacuum. I also strongly suspect that if I do keep up with the reading and his posts, he’d be willing to discuss issues that come up as a part of it.

So it’s inspiration to get moving and do something. Except that I think his second class is tomorrow and I haven’t actually cracked open the books yet!

Jeremy’s initial post already has me thinking: it’s clear to me that my view of IFR flights is not the norm. He’s listed three cons to IFR:

• Longer routes (takes more gas and time)
• Have to deal with controllers and radio
• Higher workload

Now I can understand the first one – Cliff and I regularly decide who is flying based on the route, because his is often longer. Not always, going due north from here, his route is much faster than mine because he can fly over Madrid. I would need special-VRF to do that and they never, ever grant it! Crossing the channel, I simply head north and go across. He has to stick to airways. So, yes, I’ve certainly seen that the IFR route can be longer.

But the other two: huh?

Cliff calls, and says something along the lines of: “Hi, I’m here.” ATC replies with “OK, lemme know when you get to there.” Cliff says, “OK.”

That’s it. He’s barely on the radio and he rarely has to think. It seems so simple.

Meanwhile, VFR, I’m constantly talking to someone and having to work out who it is I’m supposed to talk to next. I have to change my routing in airspace that is just packed with airfields and military zones and they all want to know my intentions and damn, am I glad when occasionally someone simply tells me they have me on radar and it goes silent.

Now Cliff tells me I don’t know the half of it, and maybe he’s right, but it sure does seem like a lot less radio and a lot less work when he’s in control.

So maybe I’ll do the instrument rating just so I can prove it. ;)

Fear of Landing will be down for server maintenance all day on Tuesday, September 18th. We’ll come back showered and refreshed and raring to go!

In the meantime, you can take a look at some of the new photographs I’ve uploaded over at Flickr.

Janet wrote:

> just got a car, after months without, and re-learning standard stick shift
> routines. today’s big stressor was parking on a hill.
>
> but, no, there was no control tower. and no one watching.

I was in this situation the other day. I don’t tend to have to drive here in Spain. In fact with local roads a bit of a mad-house and parking nigh-on impossible in the summer months, I make a point not to drive if I can possibly avoid it. And I’m good at avoiding it.

So good that I managed to go a couple of months without driving at all. Then something came up and I found myself at the wheel of the huge Lincoln Navigator 4×4 that we continue to use even though dirt roads are now a rarity and driving through the sand to the beach is strictly forbidden.

I drove into city-center Málaga and got lost and then got unlost and did what I needed to do and then drove home again. And on the way home it struck me how I simply accepted this as the way things are without getting stressed. I clearly wasn’t driving as well as when I used to commute every day. I was obviously out of practice and slow to react. I had to think about how things worked.

So why is that totally not a big deal, but getting into the plane after 6 weeks of not flying scares me to death.

The difference struck me pretty much immediately. It’s not that no one is watching (in fact, there was at least one blare of a horn to show how irately one person WAS watching as I dithered), but that I can stop. At almost any point, I can make the decision to pull over. I can make the time to sort things out. Get a map out. Phone someone for advice. Take a few deep breaths. Have a little cry.

Once you are in the plane though, you just have to keep going. OK, sure, you can call for an emergency landing and really cause chaos (especially when you explain that it was just because you were feeling a bit upset about it all) but realistically, you are stuck now until the end and if things go too fast, well, you just have to learn to get faster. That’s what freaks me out … what I really want is to be able to pull over at the side of a cloud for a moment or two and catch my breath before carrying on.
The answer, of course, is to not let 6 weeks go by without flying. To keep reading about flying and good flying practices when it can’t be avoided. And I have to admit that writing about flying has helped me think about how I fly and what types of situations cause me problems.

But really, deep-down, I think my instinctive solution would be the best one: a great big pause button on the dash of the plane. I just want the option of saying “Please hold. An operator will be with you in a moment. Thank you for your patience.”

It’s not so much to ask?

Things that happened during the flight with my mother:

1) we ended up without a VFR chart for the majority of the area we were flying over
2) my boyfriend and I descended into major arguments about basic planning (mainly based on heat and nerves rather than actual issues)
3) my mother corrected an Italian Air Traffic Controller when he told me what time it was
4) Austrian ATC gave me a five minute lecture on the radio with every other pilot flying over the Alps sniggering quietly and feeling relieved that it wasn’t them.
5) The auto-pilot died completely

Other than that, it went really well. Honest.