One of our students is actually looking forward to the reduced minima in flying weather this winter as he's taking our CAA approved IMC course which enables pilots to fly in reduced weather.
The first instructional flight was composed of some detailed ground school before we ventured out to walk around the aircraft, a Cessna 152. The 152 is an ideal training platform due to it's reletavely cheap running costs, and great flying characteristics (plus, being high wing your passengers get a good view of below).
To fly on instruments only the pilot under training must wear a set of glasses called "foggles". They are called foggles because they have a frosted top, which stops the pilot from seeing anything outside of the cockpit, only the instruments. It simulates cloud. Obviously a second safety pilot, or in this case instructor would be sitting in the other seat watching out for VFR traffic, if not in cloud.
After some ground school the refined agenda would be to fly:
- Within 50 foot tolerance of a chosen altitude on instruments
- Accurate flying of chosen heading on instruments
- VOR Tracking using TO and FROM Radials
- Position fixing from two or more VOR stations
- Good use of deice equipment (be it only Pitot Heat and Carb Heat on the 152) based on Outside Air Temperature (for Pitot and thoughts of TKS/Boots for MEP).
- Good use of instrument scan
This finished the short introduction on flying on instruments, as the weather was glorious (The pilot under tuition wasn't able to enjoy this) we decided on flying four Commercial Style Diversions. Let me explain...
Diversions in the Private Pilot Syllabus are fairly straight forward, you will know your current position and will be told to divert to a large town or city such as Ashford which has a unique shape and size on the half million scale CAA map. Commercial diversions are not this easy, they will be over small villages or hamlets, which do not have a unique shape on the map, but will be a small circle. Here other than using the three unique identifiers the pilot will do well to use a nearby town with a unique shape if position uncertain arose.
After correctly identifying 3 hamlets based on the surrounding features, the fourth one was quite tricky. It was a diversion to a hamlet near Hersmonceux, this was difficult as there was no other surrounding features which easily identified the town, so we flew to Heathfield, which was only 20 seconds away, identified this was Heathfield, then followed a road to the hamlet, which was the correct one! (there were three around to choose from).
As the sun was beginning to set we made our way back to base.