Month: April 2007

Was reading my AOPA Pilot magazine and found the article on the proposed Part 61 changes. Along with AOPA, I find a couple of the ones relating to IFR currency to be a little odd:

• Add one hour of simulated cross-country practice to instrument currency – here in SoCal, at least, you are mostly going to get your currency by simulation, either under the hood or on a sim. In either case you probably already get this as there aren’t many places you can do both a precision and a non-precision approach without flying “in the system”.
• Require pilots to wear a “view-limiting device” while training on a personal computer-based aviation training device (PCATD) – this one really confuses me. What benefit does it give to wear a hood in the sim? In actual IFR I don’t wear foggles and the experience is much much better as my head is free to move around. The weak point with the sim is the lack of turbulence – perhaps a better suggestion is to force the CFI to shake your chair from time to time??