IR Rating Dumbed Down?

gismo said:
I too had to walk uphill both ways to school and was carrying a French Horn to boot (of course it was only uphill part of the way with a compensating downhill portion of the walk and the total elevation change was probably less than 10 ft).

As to the "dumbing down" of IR training requirements I see no evidence of this beyond the elimination of four course range navigation and the reduced emphasis on ADF/NDB approaches.
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I'll see your French Horn and raise you a Bassoon! :D And the vertical difference was significantly more than 10 feet. :D:D
 
Jaybird180 said:
In this article the author stated that the IR rating requirements has been relaxed over the years (at the request by GA 'experts' namely AOPA)and that the newly rated IR pilot hasn't a clue 'about flying in the clouds'. He knows only procedures and compared to the pros he's 'infinitely' behind especially considering he's likely to fly single pilot IFR vs a commercial with a crew of 2+.

What say ye?
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I haven't read the article, and judging from yours and others comments, he sounds bitter- like too many of us old codgers.

I too, was/am a Richard Collins fan from way back, but comments like 'hasn't a clue', and 'infinitely behind' is locker room talk that only turns off the public, or interested readers, such as yourself.

But here is probably what he was talking about...back in the day...

First, the 200 hour requirement was from the requirement (when I started in the 60's) that you had to have a Commercial Certificate first, then you could get an instrument rating. (more details on this if interested)

Basically, in those days, instrument flying was still for the airlines, which were just starting to transition from props to jets. But everything was still adf and vor with paper charts and no radar and making timely position reports because timing was the only way of separation.

Tube type radios made radio failure an expected routine, which it was, and having two heavy tube type radios in private airplanes, which were still Cubs, Aeroncas, Cessna 140s, etc, was not a thought.

So, when you flew ifr, you had a solid plan of radio failure, electric failure, vacuum failure, etc, with solid real-time timing for position reports, and plans for alternates and plenty enough familiarization with the area in case of an atc re-route, by your own nav of course, so, it's still a little bit like "I had to walk uphill both ways.."

I have to agree in principle with the idea that we have become too dependent on the tools that we have now, but whining about it doesn't work. I have kinda learned that on this internet.

The fact is, the better technology we have in radios, engines, navigation systems, etc, and the reliability is so high, it isn't going to be seen as having enough 'juice to be worth the squeeze' to continue to require the kind of situational awareness that we used to have to have with the much fewer tools we had to do it for us.
 
nosehair said:
But here is probably what he was talking about...back in the day...

First, the 200 hour requirement was from the requirement (when I started in the 60's) that you had to have a Commercial Certificate first, then you could get an instrument rating. (more details on this if interested)
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Must have been the early 60's or before, because that was not the case when I got involved in flying in 1967.
 
I don't think it is dumbed down, I think that the automation has taken a ton of the workload away. I know we all studied to turn 90 degrees and timed how long it took to get to another radial, then use that to calculate your distance from the station, but have never done that in "real life". Having the gps giving ground speed and distance has significantly reduced workload.

What really "dumbs it down" is the newest avionics like the G1000. No need to listen to the VOR, it identifies it for you. No need to "twist", it sets the course for you too. Plan a descent? It calculates your suggested TOD for you also. Identify an intersection by tuning two VOR's, GPS does that for you too. All this would allow you to just concentrate on your scan, but most turn on the autopilot and watch the "magic".

I'm not saying technology is bad, I just think learning on it and having to really think about (or getting sloppy about) setting the course knob, etc. might not give students today the depth of knowledge that would help them out the most when confronted with instrument failures.
 
ja_user said:
How specifically were they relaxed? Besides the total time requirements, which were relaxed because new PP time builders kept killing themselves trying to build that time, so they could work on their IFR training
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Same here, besides eliminating AN ranges, outside of reducing the minimum hours requirement, what has been the loss to IFR training?
 
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nosehair said:
I haven't read the article, and judging from yours and others comments, he sounds bitter- like too many of us old codgers.

I too, was/am a Richard Collins fan from way back, but comments like 'hasn't a clue', and 'infinitely behind' is locker room talk that only turns off the public, or interested readers, such as yourself.
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I think you should take 5-8 minutes and read the article before making a judgement on hearsay...with all due respect sir.
 
Why should facts get in the way at this point?

Jaybird180 said:
I think you should take 5-8 minutes and read the article before making a judgement on hearsay...with all due respect sir.
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83Golf said:
What really "dumbs it down" is the newest avionics like the G1000. No need to listen to the VOR, it identifies it for you. No need to "twist", it sets the course for you too. Plan a descent? It calculates your suggested TOD for you also. Identify an intersection by tuning two VOR's, GPS does that for you too. All this would allow you to just concentrate on your scan, but most turn on the autopilot and watch the "magic".
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What is this "G1000" that you speak of? :D 1 of the 4 planes (I will admit, the one I took my IR ride in) I have access to has a GPS (430W), the other 3 are all steam gauges. The new stuff is nice, I'm sure, but I've never seen it, much less flown behind it. Sounds nice.
 
Ghery said:
What is this "G1000" that you speak of? :D 1 of the 4 planes (I will admit, the one I took my IR ride in) I have access to has a GPS (430W), the other 3 are all steam gauges. The new stuff is nice, I'm sure, but I've never seen it, much less flown behind it. Sounds nice.
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Your plane with a 430w and round analog instruments is also "steam", heck, even with a non SVT PFD you're still basically steam.
Don't ever fly IFR behind SVT unless you're ready to buy.
 
Ghery said:
I'll see your French Horn and raise you a Bassoon! :D And the vertical difference was significantly more than 10 feet. :D:D
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Do you still play? I play bassoon in a couple of community orchestras.
 
Jaybird180 said:
(not going to link- t'was a Cirrus bashing article and I want to try and minimize thread creep the author also made many highly debatable statements)....
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I purposely didn't read the article because of this statement. Besides not having a link, I didn't want to get snarled up in Cirrus basing.
In this article the author stated that the IR rating requirements has been relaxed over the years (at the request by GA 'experts' namely AOPA)and that the newly rated IR pilot hasn't a clue 'about flying in the clouds'. He knows only procedures and compared to the pros he's 'infinitely' behind especially considering he's likely to fly single pilot IFR vs a commercial with a crew of 2+.
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This statement stands alone and is the raw information that I was responding to.
What say ye?
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So I answered this basic question, but in a very overly simplified manner. Hoping to get responses to expand on.

To Henning: What has been lost, or dumbed down, is the headwork that was required to actually make time estimates on the fly. Wen you have to plan on making timely estimates, for real, not in training, not even for a checkride, but because the atc system relies on timely estimates and real back up radio failure systems, and oh, by the way, the airplanes were also much more mechanically and aerodynamically inclined to develop problems, especially in weather, so that was even more workload.

The whole deal is that today's IR pilot can achieve relatively safe instrument flight with much less basic training than the IR pilot of 50 years ago, with much less training because we have many more tools.

Collins, and others, see the loss of training in these basic "lights out" areas because training is supposed to be harder than real life.

We still believe that a basic pilot trainee should be initially trained in basic manual skills and procedures to the point of having those basic fundamental skills and procedures as automatic as unconsciously scratching an itch, (read several hundred hours of practice) then you can hand it over to the autopilot, or co-pilot, or student pilot, and just sit and watch, but be automatically on top of any serious deviation, because you have spent your time in the trenches~ meaning you have reached a high enough level of proficiency to supervise your tools; they are not flying you. You are flying them.

As a life-long teacher, I realize training is more than being able to use the tools; training changes the person.

The more able you become, the more able you become.
 
Just caught this thread....sheesh my CFII kicked my donkey for the rating, continually pushed me to the limit in pencil and paper flight planning, multiple failures, (back to basics: fly with the mag compass, my timer, and paper) we flew as much in actual as we possibly could, and Doug Stewart held me to the max over a full 7+ hours on the ground and in the plane for the checkride. That's dumbing down?????

Yeah, I use fltplan and foreflight, fly a plane with some bells and whistles, GPS-WAAS, and backups, but I'm always considering what to do should crap fly out of the panel and land in the back seat...I'm not saying this make me anything special, just that I'm not sure how dumbing down comes into play.

Now my CFI covers the AI and the DG to force me to look outside the freeking plane at landmarks working on the commercial stuff.
 
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Hmmm...interesting. My CFII didn't leave out timing, I had to figure time to each reporting point, turn and intersection as I turned each leg and keep a running tab on my ETA to the IAF, and I did all 40 with my CFII with most every flight after the first one being a cross country voyage of several hours since we were doing it in a week. I had 1 KX 170B, and ADF and a clock to figure it all off of. I had Satan for a CFII and got no breaks in my training. Thing is, if we had been in a Cirrus or other TAA, he would have been just as tough and I would have still flown 38 out of 40hrs partial panel.
 
Ron Levy said:
Must have been the early 60's or before, because that was not the case when I got involved in flying in 1967.
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Yeah, my commercial was in '62, when it was a 200 hour requirement and no instrument rating. They did have the 10 hour instrument time requirement for the commercial, which was generally the only instrument time most commercial applicants had.
The instrument rating was seen as a rating to get after you had many hundreds of hours flying vfr.
The regulatory requirement was to have a Commercial, or as an exception, you did not want to be certified as a commercial pilot, but remain a private, you could apply for the IR, but would still have to meet all commercial requirements, including the written, the vfr commercial oral and checkride before proceeding with the instrument checkride.

The checkride would include steep (45~60) turns, stalls, etc. under the hood, as well as plenty of unusual attitude recovery on needle-ball-&-airspeed only, as well as full approaches, enroute difficulties, no radar, etc. on partial panel and more realistic radio or other failures.
Examiners were allowed (I think obligated) to be sneaky and inventive about simulating emergency situations.

It was around the mid-60s, when the Viet Nam war and subsequent GI Bill that paid for flight training, and all the part 61 mom-and-pop schools around the country suddenly bought a bunch of Nosewheel Trainers:
Cessna 150s, and Cherokee 140s. And they all had full six-pack instrument panels, and 2 radios- some with a glideslope receiver.
And easy to fly.
And the regulations changed to require an instrument before the commercial, xcept with the current restrictions, and the total time requirement jumped up to 250, with the PP IR requirement cut in half to 125.

Somewhere in there was the introduction of the PTS; prior to the PTS, there was a Checkride Guide, which basically referenced the maneuvers/procedures you would know from the FTH. The Examiner would decide more of the how/when/where to test- which was a better method because students had to learn everything in the FTH- not just the referenced parts in the PTS.
The PTS has become a minimum training standard, instead of a more precise and accurate way of sampling the training that should be occuring according to the FlightTraining Handbook which is referenced in the PTS.

Not everything in the FTH is on the PTS, but the PTS isn't supposed to be the training manual; the FTH is.
 
nosehair said:
I purposely didn't read the article because of this statement. Besides not having a link, I didn't want to get snarled up in Cirrus basing.
This statement stands alone and is the raw information that I was responding to.So I answered this basic question, but in a very overly simplified manner. Hoping to get responses to expand on.

To Henning: What has been lost, or dumbed down, is the headwork that was required to actually make time estimates on the fly. Wen you have to plan on making timely estimates, for real, not in training, not even for a checkride, but because the atc system relies on timely estimates and real back up radio failure systems, and oh, by the way, the airplanes were also much more mechanically and aerodynamically inclined to develop problems, especially in weather, so that was even more workload.

The whole deal is that today's IR pilot can achieve relatively safe instrument flight with much less basic training than the IR pilot of 50 years ago, with much less training because we have many more tools.

Collins, and others, see the loss of training in these basic "lights out" areas because training is supposed to be harder than real life.

We still believe that a basic pilot trainee should be initially trained in basic manual skills and procedures to the point of having those basic fundamental skills and procedures as automatic as unconsciously scratching an itch, (read several hundred hours of practice) then you can hand it over to the autopilot, or co-pilot, or student pilot, and just sit and watch, but be automatically on top of any serious deviation, because you have spent your time in the trenches~ meaning you have reached a high enough level of proficiency to supervise your tools; they are not flying you. You are flying them.

As a life-long teacher, I realize training is more than being able to use the tools; training changes the person.

The more able you become, the more able you become.
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Would those " basic skills" be four course radio...........or the more advanced and simplistic VOR system?

I'll get back, as soon as I hitch the oxen. Gotta travel today....
 
I think that focusing on the single dumb-down issue misses the point of Dicks' article. Further, I'd be willing to bet he could defend the statement, although it's of little consequence now.

The question he asked is "Why does the Cirrus fleet have so many accidents when all of the factors he mentioned should work in its favor?" Is the answer to that question more or less important than nit-picking the rating requirements?

What's the answer?
 
Henning said:
Your plane with a 430w and round analog instruments is also "steam", heck, even with a non SVT PFD you're still basically steam.
Don't ever fly IFR behind SVT unless you're ready to buy.
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I better stay away, then. My wife would NOT be amused. :D

Palmpilot said:
Do you still play? I play bassoon in a couple of community orchestras.
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Unfortunately, no. I don't have one, and I would want to get something decent. Heckle would be nice. None of that crap Linton stuff. I checked one out for my son's high school band teacher about 20 years ago and saved her some coin by recommending that they not buy it. :D
 
wabower said:
I think that focusing on the single dumb-down issue misses the point of Dicks' article. Further, I'd be willing to bet he could defend the statement, although it's of little consequence now.

The question he asked is "Why does the Cirrus fleet have so many accidents when all of the factors he mentioned should work in its favor?" Is the answer to that question more or less important than nit-picking the rating requirements?

What's the answer?
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Been discussed ad-infinitum without a definitive answer.

If I'm buying today its SR22T FIKI. No, I'm not biased:wink2:
 
Ghery said:
I better stay away, then. My wife would NOT be amused. :D



Unfortunately, no. I don't have one, and I would want to get something decent. Heckle would be nice. None of that crap Linton stuff. I checked one out for my son's high school band teacher about 20 years ago and saved her some coin by recommending that they not buy it. :D
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If you fly IFR with her she'll be impressed and a lot more comfortable when she looks at the panel.
 
wabower said:
Many do. For a while.
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Yep, now 34% of accidents are CFiT, most the rest fuel management. Interesting thing in the 1979-1990 time period it was 45%. Can anybody tell me what has changed between 1990 and now to cause an 11% change?
 
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wabower said:
I think that focusing on the single dumb-down issue misses the point of Dicks' article. Further, I'd be willing to bet he could defend the statement, although it's of little consequence now.

The question he asked is "Why does the Cirrus fleet have so many accidents when all of the factors he mentioned should work in its favor?" Is the answer to that question more or less important than nit-picking the rating requirements?

What's the answer?
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The same reason Bonanzas had such a lousy record back in the 70's -- too many pilots who can afford more airplane they they have the knowledge and experience to fly safely, in terms of both stick and rudder skills and aeronautical decision making. Cirrus contributes to that by marketing the plane as a transportation system and alternative to airline travel without ensuring their customers have a full appreciation of the limitations of the aircraft, especially regarding weather.
 
Henning said:
Yep, now 34% of accidents are CFiT, most the rest fuel management. Interesting thing in the 1979-1990 time period it was 45%. Can anybody tell me what has changed between 1990 and now to cause an 11% change?
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Global warming caused the mountains to shrink.
 
Ron Levy said:
The same reason Bonanzas had such a lousy record back in the 70's -- too many pilots who can afford more airplane they they have the knowledge and experience to fly safely, in terms of both stick and rudder skills and aeronautical decision making. Cirrus contributes to that by marketing the plane as a transportation system and alternative to airline travel without ensuring their customers have a full appreciation of the limitations of the aircraft, especially regarding weather.
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You can teach someone how to fly an airplane and fly that airplane well and within their limits. However you can't teach judgement.. and flying requires a lot of good and consistent judgement..
 
Ron Levy said:
The same reason Bonanzas had such a lousy record back in the 70's -- too many pilots who can afford more airplane they they have the knowledge and experience to fly safely, in terms of both stick and rudder skills and aeronautical decision making. Cirrus contributes to that by marketing the plane as a transportation system and alternative to airline travel without ensuring their customers have a full appreciation of the limitations of the aircraft, especially regarding weather.
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A lot of it is also associated with the personality types and flaws involved in thos who have succeeded at something and then take on a new challenge. You see it on the race tracks and even highways as they buy more equipment than they have skill for and believe if they made a million dollars by 40 or whatever they can do this at advanced levels right off the bat with minimal training and personal effort in learning,they earned that right with their purchase power; and it kills them. Technology is intrisically good, it takes stupid people to screw it up.

You can use technology 2 ways in an airplane, to augment other information or to replace it. If you use it as an augment it will be money well spent as protection against failure, if you use it as a replacement it nearly assures your death upon failure. It's all up to how the PIC decides to view his responsibilities.
 
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45 year old dudes buying the biggest Harley or GSXR style bike as their first bike, they are doomed. There are accident you will have in the learning process lol, best to have the in the dirt and away from traffic. At least off road the worst that's gonna happen is you hit an immovable object. On the road it could be coming at you at 70. Race trace is good for learning and riding hard WFO. Also a great long term project if you have kids and they want to race. You build the best 750 you can over the years having fun with it and bring the kid through peewee racing and hand it over to them to campaign when they're ready. That's the road to a GP ride.
 
Ghery said:
Unfortunately, no. I don't have one, and I would want to get something decent. Heckle would be nice. None of that crap Linton stuff. I checked one out for my son's high school band teacher about 20 years ago and saved her some coin by recommending that they not buy it. :D
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Fox (and others) make some very decent bassoons for a LOT less money than Heckel.

http://www.wwbw.com/Fox,Bassoons-Double-Reed-Instruments.wwbw

I have a Fox Model 240 that I use as a backup to my Heckel.
 
Henning said:
If you fly IFR with her she'll be impressed and a lot more comfortable when she looks at the panel.
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rbridges said:
true, but my wife would be a little upset when she looked at our checking account balance. :lol:
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Mine would be, too. She is much happier with the cost structure of the club. She'd just think I wanted a plane with the G1000 because she's convinced I like flying because there are lots of buttons to push and knobs to twist. :D

Palmpilot said:
Fox (and others) make some very decent bassoons for a LOT less money than Heckel.

http://www.wwbw.com/Fox,Bassoons-Double-Reed-Instruments.wwbw

I have a Fox Model 240 that I use as a backup to my Heckel.
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Good to know. Thanks.
 
....and what's wrong with pushing buttons and turning knobs?:)
 
I hand fly all the time, in fact I stay proficient on the AP but only try to use it when the conditions and workload warrent it...
 
Standards are higher today than when I got my IFR ticket punched 30 years ago. Back then, I got the bare minimum of 80 hours before the checkride by extending my pattern work before landing at the exam airport.

The difference back then was that I had a CFII with over 40,000 hours who encouraged me to get my IR. He would actually call me at 04:00 to meet him at BTR for some real IMC flying. Taking off in the fog in 0/0 was not my line of fun, neither was shooting a dozen approaches to minimums, but he taught me well.
 
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