
A fellow on the Internet who is over in the UK and is hoping to eventually start his training to be a pilot has written to me with some questions. Usually they are fairly specific, the replies are short, and I just shoot them back in an email. Even when they are things that can be answered with an Internet search (“How much fuel does your plane carry?”), but particularly when they are ones that are pretty hard to find out there (“What do you carry on a long trip?”).
He wrote recently to ask some questions about instrument flight. I thought back to when I was first training for my IFR ticket and the realization that some of the questions I had at the time would have been answered easily with a little history lesson. I’m going to ignore the fact that these questions come from across the pond. There are regulation variations from country to country (you can’t fly VFR at night in Mexico, you have to be on an instrument flight plan). I’m just to answer with what I remember from my training and my current flying. I’ll probably make some mistakes and perhaps my readers will chime in with some corrections in the comments.
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