No. I do very very little IMC handflying. Really only that one hour during the IR reval. Plus maybe one more hour a year where I do this for fun/for training. And still, when I go back to doing it, after say 6 months, I will not lose control. Anyway, the point was not about me. It was about the usual story: people writing about IFR flying that have either zero or very little actual experience with it. 
Peter wrote:
I was responding to post 33 which is a UK-specific one, criticising the UK IMC Rating.
I was not criticising the IMC rating. I was just observing that a pilot with 15 hours of instrument training was not capable of controlling the aircraft simulator in IMC. The training requirement for the EIR is also 15 hrs.
In that case he won’t be an IMCR pilot because he will fail the checkride 
Nobody suggests everybody can get the IMCR in 15hrs.
Also the IMCR is normally done in the PPL school environment where the condition of the planes is usually laughable. I am sure I have previously written about mine which was split across two PA28s; one had a working DME and one had a working ADF, and the instructor (proudly wearing his pilot uniform and having a “CPL/IR”) carried a £50 GPS from a camping shop which he used to create a “DME readout”. Other instructors I had were even funnier. So you can guess how the training went. Like so much in aviation, it is what you make of it. I finished my IMCR in the TB20.
Also many pilots come with lots of unofficial (unlogged) experience – either sim time or actual RHS flying time. Anybody who turns up for the IMCR or the IR without having spent many hours in a home sim is going to waste a great deal of money. And arguably the best pilots are the ones with this unlogged experience because they are keen enthusiasts who absorb the material well.
Peter wrote:
One is that when flying in the European IFR system you have to be on autopilot 100% of the time because ATC is usually watching you like a hawk and will call you up if you deviate a bit.
Thanks for making us feel like flying gods on this gloomy friday morning!
I’ve done many trips 100% hand flow (on a DA40 which had a GFC700), and can’t recall being even hinted at a deviation (unless misunderstood instruction perhaps). That’s not to say I haven’t done some altitude deviations (I certainly have), but once properly trimmed it’s not hard to do say a Paris → London, all handflown, with no basically no deviation, with only one finger (or thigh) input once in a while.
On your 7h legs, that might be something else, but that I have no experience of!
If you have a good Flight Director then precise hand flying in IMC is a piece of cake. That’s the only way I usually do it, and that is only for training or fun. That’s actually one of the great advantages of the newer generation of autoilots like the GFC700, DFC90 … that their Flight Directors worke very precisely. Let’s even me, who flies little in IMC, look good …
The flight director removes all the fun!
I generally remove it when I want to handfly, except on takeoff when I leave in Go-around mode, just in case any emergency arises.
Alexis wrote:
If you have a good Flight Director then precise hand flying in IMC is a piece of cake. That’s the only way I usually do it, and that is only for training or fun. That’s actually one of the great advantages of the newer generation of autoilots like the GFC700, DFC90 … that their Flight Directors worke very precisely. Let’s even me, who flies little in IMC, look good …
Flying with a flight director is not exactly hand flying in the sense meant here. In my view the autopilot is still flying the plane just using you as a servo. As a slight aside, I suggest either flying the command bars in the FD or turning the FD off. Hand flying with a distracting set of command bars suggesting something different from what you are trying to do is very hard.
Literally handflying and trying to keep roughly on course/altitude should not be hard for a properly trained IR pilot. Doing it in IMC with turbulence, at night while trying to set up avionics for an approach can be more testing and is in my view challenging even for very current pilots. But in the end that is still just about scan and workload management.
Yes, I know – but it’s the best compromise. And if you take into account that many times when the A/P fails it’s the servos the FD is a good alternative, because it will still work if a servo is bad. I actually practiced “hand flying” with the FD a lot in my IFR refresher training and the head of the training organization (Aero Poznan, Poland) was actually the CFI who taught me to use it more often.
Tastes are different, but I find the FD more fun than “raw data” hand flying.
A good article for pilots who are not yet familiar with the FD: https://www.flyingmag.com/wonder-flight-director
I use the flight director when hand flying is done on departure and I want the autopilot to be able to take over when handed over to London for example.
boscomantico wrote:
people writing about IFR flying that have either zero or very little actual experience with it.
