First time in the clouds and I gave up

SixPapaCharlie

SixPapaCharlie

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I could probably pass my IR checkride at this point but never spent any time in the clouds.
We went out and did some XC stuff under the foggles and broke through a thin layer multiple times departing and arriving.

Danced around Texas in the Cirrus, nailing approaches, filed everywhere and nailed everything.
Then a very thick layer started to build up back at home an so off with the foggles, let's do this for real.

30 seconds in, I said "Your airplane I am no longer interested in this rating".

She flew us home.

Having never been in the clouds for any length of time, I hadn't expected a couple of things.
1. VFR at altitude, the ground goes by pretty slow. Once you are in the clouds, you are well aware that you are moving 200 MPH. I felt like I was moving a million miles an hour and couldn't focus on the instruments because the shadows, clouds, and rain made it feel like we were moving 10X faster

2. Foggles are not IMC. Even with Foggles, you get little bits of info from your peripheral vision. It doesn't take a half second of information coming from those foggle gaps to orient you. In the clouds, that doesn't happen. I have never been one to cheat but under the foggles, there are snippets of ground that sneak in and your brain takes advantage of that.

C. I totally get how people get disoriented and die VFR into IMC. When I handed her the plane, we were in a climbing right bank and I have never felt more straight and level in my life.

I was never scared but I was task saturated by ATC and the epiphany that THIS is how people die.
I have wondered since I passed my PPL checkride how could anyone get disoriented in IMC the instruments are right there. I totally get it now.

This was really eye opening. I cant imagine getting your IR and never flying in actual. If I were alone and flew into this I would have either climbed up and gone somewhere else or declared.

They were barking vectors at me and I was hand flying and the instruments were "lying to me".
I may not continue. After 7 years of flying, I am not overly motivated to be in a situation that I have been able to avoid with a simple go / no go decision for the last 800 hours.




Screenshot_20201108-173711_Video Player.jpg
 
Is this part of your comedy routine?

As far as clouds being distracting, I agree. The trick is to focus inside on your instruments.

one trick is to pretend you are flying a flight simulator inside a box that is being randomly shaken... ;)
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I may not continue. After 7 years of flying, I am not overly motivated to be in <actual IMC>
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Depending on how close you are to the checkride, I'd still finish out the rating even though you never intend to use it in anger. Keep in mind that the checkride is done in VMC, or at least you can schedule it so.
 
The biggest difference I saw from foggle faking to Actual was that in actual you have all the cockpit distractions, rather than having your view directed.

Go grab some more actual, it'll sink in.
 
Bryan: totally understand, experienced that.

My “mind trick” is to remember two things:

1. If you’re trimmed right, the plane doesn’t need much to go where you want it to go, so light control inputs are the thing; don’t believe it? Watch how little the autopilot has to do.

2. Don’t think of it as “Oh, God, I have to fly it right for the next 20 minutes”; you just have to keep it under control for ten seconds, and you can do that. Then the next 10. Then the next ten. And so forth.

—-

Get back on that horse, because you can do it.
 
I had the same reactions my first times in actual. Like everything else with instrument flight, you will get used to it. Spend some time in actual with an instructor and you will get more comfortable.
 
I only have about 9 hrs in actual and this is the precise reason I wanted to the bulk of the IR training in actual, well that’s not gonna happen this time of the year. I agree, there are a whole lot distractions in the clouds, even more if you are going in and out constantly. Initial few were nerve wracking for me, eventually it sinks in. Now that was with a CFII onboard and more than a year ago, so will see how that goes once I get the rating. Curios, assuming you have an awesome AP, you can let it fly until you get situated and and slowly get into hand flying. For the minimal experience I got, it was inside MSP bravo where there is not a dull moment, the crappy AP I had back then helped a lot while briefing approach plates and setting up the plane for approach while AP is flying, then when the task saturation gets a little less, hand fly. Albeit with my previous AP I had keep one eye out to figure out what the heck George is doing now.
 
Get back on the horse.The first 30 secs in actual is the worse, especially when ATC is barking instructions a mile a minute. Sounds like you suddenly got overwhelmed. I remember the first time I was in actual IFR, it wasn’t pretty. IFR requires one to be ahead of the plane, knowing what comes next, having a good instrument scan established. Actual IFR can be much easier than Foggles. Going in and out of clouds requires a lot more concentration and can be disorienting. It happens to all of us once in awhile, we just realize if we concentrate on the instruments, the disorientation will go away. We all agree the IFR rating is a license to learn and to keep current.
 
In the beginning I use to put the foggles back on in IMC and that took care of the outside distractions.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
...Foggles are not IMC...

...This was really eye opening. I cant imagine getting your IR and never flying in actual...
Click to expand...

Years ago I remember reading a column (I think it was J. Mac McClellan?) about an annual contest that Flying Mag (again, ?) was one of the sponsors of. This was a skills competition for the top new graduates from all the major flight training academies across the land. One of the exercises was to fly a comprehensive IFR scenario. One year the weather during the event was IMC. To their complete surprise they discovered that not one of the contestants could fly the IFR scenario to minimum standards in IMC. Not one.

Our Club flight training unit has two Seneca II trainers, one is FIKI. We ensure every one of our multi IFR students gets real IMC experience and we try to give as many as we can real experience in icing too. Where we are on the edge of the Rockies IMC frequently involves icing (along with a lot of convective in the summers).

You just need the repetition and practice Bryan. Get it across the finish line.
But as a private pilot who flies for pleasure, I can sure identify with your view that it's just not all that much fun flying in the clouds, so why bother.
 
Also should mention, hand-flying for Harambe in IMC is a heavy workload but right now where you’re at it’s double what it feels like later. The scan isn’t automatic, the little constant corrections, etc. Many people hit a frustration plateau at that “I’m always overloaded and behind the airplane” stage.

Ask @jesse how much I cussed when he tossed me a DG failure when I was feeling saucy that I was finally getting ahead of chit. Ha.

I literally told him that I needed to land out of that totally botched approach because I was too angry to go missed. LOL. Needed a break.
 
Thanks for sharing.

Get some more actual.

My first time - We we’re taking off with 300 ft ceilings. I felt confident. Told my CFI I’d handle the radios as usual. You could’ve put a gun to my head and I would not have been able to repeat a word in the next transmission from tower (except my call sign). Told my CFI “your radio”. Flew to an airport 30 miles away, low approach, and back. My shirt was soaked. Take away: this is going to be a huge challenge for me to get good enough to get signed off for a checkride.

And you’re right, the easy VFR pilot’s go/no-go becomes a more complex decision.

Just do the training for the training’s sake, relax, take it easy. Don’t try to go at it like you’re gonna kill your family (lol). Just have fun being humbled. Take your medicine.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Foggles are not IMC
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haha no they are not.. they are a far cry from it

SixPapaCharlie said:
I cant imagine getting your IR and never flying in actual
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Yeah same here, it's crazy to me that the FARs don't require actual instrument time

Flying IMC is the real deal

After a few years and plenty of "actual" time I still get the focus factor dialed up to 11 and a little bit of the "okay, it will be nice to see again" feeling when in the clouds
 
If you want to do it, you can.

If you don’t want to do it, that’s also acceptable. It’s not for everyone.

It’s humbling, rewarding, and potentially deadly. And you are drinking from the firehose. Things slow down as you get more experienced and proficient. They speed up if you get rusty.
 
iamtheari said:
If you want to do it, you can.

If you don’t want to do it, that’s also acceptable. It’s not for everyone.

It’s humbling, rewarding, and potentially deadly. And you are drinking from the firehose. Things slow down as you get more experienced and proficient. They speed up if you get rusty.
Click to expand...

Well said.
 
Some have said “for the recreational pilot,
IFR is not “fun”. I totally disagree. Lots of cool stuff to see in IMC, and the feeling of accomplishment when executing a successful flight is much greater.
 
So, you have a lot more experience than me. I’m mid-200 hours and quit my IR temporarily due to Covid.

In my humble opinion foggles are worthless. Practice with the actual hood. It removes those peripheral clues. Also use a sim for additional practice. Great for procedures and a somewhat cheaper method to work on what you know.

That said I’m sure actual is much more intimidating says me with zero actual.
 
dans2992 said:
Some have said “for the recreational pilot,
IFR is not “fun”. I totally disagree. Lots of cool stuff to see in IMC, and the feeling of accomplishment when executing a successful flight is much greater.
Click to expand...

I fit the description you made above. I like the challenge.

But IFR doesn't seem to add anything to the joy of flight for the majority of VFR recreational pilots. If it did they'd all be seeking the rating. And spending more AMUs on airplanes.
 
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dans2992 said:
Some have said “for the recreational pilot,
IFR is not “fun”. I totally disagree. Lots of cool stuff to see in IMC, and the feeling of accomplishment when executing a successful flight is much greater.
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Bryan,

"training for IFR", is not fun. It's work, it will be frustrating at times, the feeling of overload is real, at least in the beginning. However, as danns2992 stated, "the feeling of accomplishment when executing a successful flight is much greater."

When things slow down in the cockpit and you're back to flying ahead of the plane, you will be glad you have the rating.
 
It’s a challenging rating for good reason. It’s a lot easier if you are extremely comfortable with the plane you are flying. You switched back to the cirrus from the Grumman. I’d fly the cirrus vfr every chance you get until it’s boring. Fly the approaches with radio work while alone vfr (no view limiting device obviously). It does wonders for your confidence and getting the comms and flows up into muscle memory.
 
actual can be very intimidating, the initial entry into actual can be overwhelming, go get some actual with your instructor. Set minimums you are comfortable with, and do a little actual at a time.
 
You are absolutely right, foggles are no replacement for actual. I was nervous as hell my first flight alone in actual conditions. Strangely I’m comfortable once I’m established and configured. It was always the climb out and initial turn on course and the arriving at the final fix that always spooked me. In the Venture it’s easy to not want to trust the instruments on climb out because your body tells you all sorts of lies. Finish the rating and get some actual practice in with an instructor or another experienced pilot.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
Ha! No. My youtube is fiction. This was real and humbling.
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Yea, flying does the virtual kick in the nuts at times to remind us it's not our natural domain. It gets worse when you stick us in the clouds. Remember private flying up to solo? I'd get in my car after the event totally spent. Same with instrument training. I couldn't even turn the radio on and just went over what I could have done better on the flight on the drive home.

The instrument rating was far harder than the PPL for me and I came at it with a couple thousand plus hours in the right seat as a Prowler NFO so all the comms and reading plates and such was 2nd nature. In the year and half I've had the rating I have only logged 9.0 hours of actual time in 123.9 hours flown but I file IFR for anything but a local flight. Most of those 9 hours have been .2 to .4 at a time. That's been mostly going through layers and in and out of clouds. I can count on less than two hands the times I've needed to shoot a real approach and none have been to below 500'. Still, I regard the rating as truly useful and I'm really happy I did it.

Take what you experienced as a learning point, press on and get the rating and then, just like your private, the learning really starts. The first time you pull up to the hold short to depart into an IFR overcast knowing it's beautiful on top and VFR only pilots are sitting at home makes it all worth it. In fact, I've got enough actual time now to look forward to going out on those days.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I was task saturated by ATC and the epiphany that THIS is how people die.

They were barking vectors at me and I was hand flying and the instruments were "lying to me".
I may not continue. After 7 years of flying, I am not overly motivated to be in a situation that I have been able to avoid with a simple go / no go decision for the last 800 hours.
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I absolutely HATED doing an IFR training in busy, controlled airspace. Doing multiple approaches, always setting up an approach, going missed, having to constantly setup for the next one while flying an ever changing vector with an every changing altitude with drill sergeant like controllers. There were a couple times I thought about giving up but my CFI told me that the real world is not even close to this difficult. And he was right.

Now when it gets busy, I turn on the A/P so I can push buttons, turn knobs and respond to controllers.

As for the difference between actual and foggles, we scheduled a couple training sessions during actual. It was very eye opening. Do that a couple of times and bet you get better.
 
Take your time. While it is true that some acclimate more quickly than others, most everyone is surprised and disoriented by it the first (or even the first few) times. There's also a purely psychological aspect. Scary to think you can't just pull off the hood and see and that by itself can lead our scan to deteriorate. But most of us get over it.

And yes, it is an issue for those who due to either schedule or climate get little to no cloud time during training, but the answer to that is post-rating training, not foregoing the rating altogether.
 
Jeez...you've spent the money, spent the time, you've got the training.....get the rating. You don't have to ever use it.
 
I've never met an IFR student who didn't get task saturated. Keep going. IFR goes with a Cirrus like milk and cookies.
 
I'm still an IR student like you. My first time in actual was very intense and disorienting.
I quickly noticed what you noticed on your flight: the sudden loss of that small cue that the foggles allow you to have.
After a few minutes, I started to feel better.
Close to the end we had a real gyro failure (AI). That increased the workload by a lot. And I understood how people get into spiral dives following the failing AI.
Next time in actual was a lot easier, no foggles the entire flight. Still high workload.
Like others said, don't forget you can ask George to help!
 
Bryan, persevere, and at least get the rating. I mean hey, you're first youtube videos were about as bad as your first actual. Well, maybe not that bad, but your present vids are much more professional now that you've had lots of experience in writing, production, and video editing. Your IFR flying will get much more professional as you get more experience flying instrument conditions.

Persevere, get the rating, and then fly VFR if that makes you happy.
 
Keep going! It gets a little easier each time you do it. I've got just over 10 hours actual and the last 2 were fun! The first couple hours were stressful for sure! If the plane has an autopilot, use it. In training you are shooting multiple approaches back to back, going missed, flying holds, basically running the gauntlet for a couple hours straight. That's just not the case in the real world. Set your personal limits. Maybe you only poke your head into the clouds on VFR days? That can be your personal limit until you get more time and experience. I personally wont go if the forecast is less than MVFR. I'm sure that will change as I build experience but that's what I feel comfortable with now. For sure, finish and get that rating! Don't give up it will get better.
 
Stick with it. Good to have the 1st experience with an instructor. I had some actual very early in my training, but most of my time was with foggles. First actual after rating was into the soup from clear in the middle of a procedure turn to join an approach. My brain went nuts and felt like I was turning in the opposite direction. Scared the crap out of me. Once established, all settled down and popped out at my then personal mins of 1,000 ft with runway where it was supposed to be. Now I look for days where I can do a few approaches in actual and it all feels normal.
You can just use the rating to punch through a layer for a longer trip where most of the way is VFR. If I have passengers, that's pretty much my current minimums until I get 50ish hours of actual.
 
I am going up again today and we are going to get in the clouds and not worry about approaches / arrivals, but just practice flying a heading, doing some turns, etc. the very basic things you do on day 1 under the hood.
He said we can go further away from Dallas where it is quieter and get acclimated to flying the plane in the clouds with reduced stress from not being under the bravo.
I guess there are ways to get on a flight plan with some wiggle room for turns, climbs, etc. I am not sure how that works. I am going to go up a few more times to assess my aviation goals.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
2. Foggles are not IMC. Even with Foggles, you get little bits of info from your peripheral vision. It doesn't take a half second of information coming from those foggle gaps to orient you. In the clouds, that doesn't happen. I have never been one to cheat but under the foggles, there are snippets of ground that sneak in and your brain takes advantage of that.
Click to expand...
I'm sorry to hear about your experience. You're absolutely right, you've been cheated in your IFR training, not by your school specifically (they're just doing what everyone else does), but by the whole aviation industry -- foggles and hoods are useless nonsense that just give pilots false confidence, and it's highly unethical that flight schools routinely train pilot for IFR and the FAA will grant a rating without at least, say, 10 hours of actual IMC (or maybe a full-motion sim, but even the Redbird doesn't really recreate the experience of flying in IMC, and you can hear the motor hum whenever it's trying to disorient you).

Give yourself a bit of time — I had a similar experience, not with my IFR training, but with my first VFR intro flight in a C150 in March 2002, I was so motion sick and unhappy after the flight that I was convinced flight training wasn't for me, as I lay on the couch for two hours with my head spinning. But then I decided to do just one lesson (paying extra for a 172 instead of a 150, since I'm not a small guy), and it wasn't quite as bad. I was still probably going to quit, but I might as well make sure. And so on, to over 1,200 hours.

Don't try to decide right now, but take a two week break to take care of yourself, then — only if you want — try seeking out a bit of easy IMC (e.g. smooth stratus rather than bumpy cumulus) with your instructor and go back to the basics, attitude flying, scanning technique, etc. It's not easy, but it's highly rewarding, and you have every right to be angry that the system is set up so that most IFR students don't really get taught that stuff in realistic conditions. :(

[Just saw your most-recent post after I replied to your initial one. Sounds like a good idea.]
 
Its not for everyone. The gentleman who took me up for my first flight had no desire to do ifr. He liked low and slow. He built a cub replica and flew gliders. His son, same story, except he got into aerobatics.

My favorite part of flying is going places. I got sick of being stuck in the bumps under a layer and knowing that another 1000' would be perfect smooth air. Turned out that flying ifr tickles the part of my brain that enjoys making spreadsheets and filling out forms, and I really enjoy shooting approaches in actual. Clearly I'm a weirdo, though.

The first approach I flew in actual, my cfii had to take the yoke as i was in a left bank and didn't realize it. It's definitely different than under the hood. Don't get discouraged by the first time...I think everyone freaks out a little.
 
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