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Safety Training

Your Instrument Rating: Train Efficiently

Rick Durden
Verified

Edited By:

Omar Filipovic

This is where it all comes together—training, planning, skills and decision-making—as you get ready to safely launch into the murk as a competent, confident, instrument-rated pilot-in-command.

You love flying VFR. Its freedom is intoxicating and the things you have seen … yet there are times it’s not so great. Such as the two nights in the fleabag motel and the two days running the battery flat on your phone as you haunted every weather site you could find while you waited for the seemingly never-ending cycle of just barely IFR to play out before you could continue that trip.

And then there’s flight following—listening as the controller speaks a barely comprehensible language to the IFR chosen on the frequency. What does that stuff mean?

Rick Durden

Senior Editor Rick Durden has written for Aviation Consumer since 1994 and specializes in aviation law. Rick is an active CFII and holds an ATP with type ratings in the Douglas DC-3 and Cessna Citation. He is the author of The Thinking Pilot’s Flight Manual or, How to Survive Flying Little Airplanes and Have a Ball Doing It, Vols. 1 & 2.