The ground school session began with the instructor's delivering a short autobiographical sketch and then asking me to do the same. No doubt it eases tension and thus promotes learning when teacher and adult student establish an informal relationship at the get-go. But my instructor had another good reason for devoting the first few minutes of the class to howdy-dos: he was developing a Polaroid snapshot of me so that he could present the material in a way that best suited my experience level and particular flying needs — an admirable technique for a teacher.
During the introductions he asked me a question I couldn't answer without referring to my logbook, which I did not have with me in the classroom. "What percentage of your time is on instruments?" he asked. When I answered with a perplexed look, he said that the average for instrument-rated pilots is about 5 percent. "Okay, I'll be average," I said. "Put me down for 5."
I had never heard this statistic, and I was intrigued. The first thing I did when I got back to my hotel room that evening was to flip open my logbook to the last page of entries and figure what percentage of my total time in the sky has been spent droning around in the clouds. (Logged IFR time is supposed to be time spent in instrument meteorological conditions, not the time spent flying on an IFR flight plan.) The answer: 8.39349 percent, to be as exact as the calculator allows. That's above my instructor's rule of thumb standard, but I think his thumb is different from mine. His is rooted in the turbine aircraft world, in which pilots typically encounter weather only on their way up to and down from severe-clear flight levels. Most of my time is in piston singles, flying at 12,000 feet msl and below, where all of the weather lurks. If you pile up a lot of cross-country time in piston singles, you are going to spend some quality time in the clouds.
Thinking about percentages led me to look across the logbook ledger to the column labeled "Night." This worked out to be 12.3 percent of my total time — considerably more than the IFR percentage, but it made sense. Every bit of the time you fly between sundown and sunup is night flight, whereas only a fraction of the time spent on an IFR flight plan is in actual instrument meteorological conditions (IMC).
What I don't know without making an exhaustive study of my logbooks (and I'm too exhausted from doing other things to tackle that chore) is how much time I have spent doing both things at the same time: flying at night in the weather. Looking back over the last year's worth of pages, I can see that there has been some of that — 0.5 IFR on a 1.2-hour flight from Wichita to Kansas City; a three- hour night trip from Springfield, Illinois, with the last hour in the clouds culminating in an ILS approach in snow; a 2.5-hour trip of which the last hour was in clouds, again finishing with an ILS approach; and two or three other flights that combined night and IMC.
Compared to my total time, night IMC barely registers — 2.3 percent of my hours in the last 12 months, and that is for an active cross-country year. I'd wager that previous-year percentages were even lower.
Why is this number crunching important to me? Based on accident statistics, night IFR is some of the riskiest business a single pilot can undertake, and night IMC approaches are even riskier. The risk comes not only from the restrictions to visibility imposed by clouds and darkness, but it also is heightened by pilot fatigue. Night flights are often conducted after a long day of doing something, either business or flying or both. A day of intense concentration, perhaps after an inadequate night's sleep, fueled by a high-calorie, high-fat, high-caffeine diet, adds up to one fatigued pilot. Add clouds to the brew and the flying gets even tougher. Now imagine concluding this long day and night with an instrument approach in the clouds and it's easy to see why the statistics point to night IMC approaches as a particularly testy phase of flight. I'm probably at my worst, mentally speaking, at precisely the time I should be at my sharpest.
I'm not trying to talk myself out of night flying, or night IMC, or even night IMC approaches. I am, however, doing a bang-up job of convincing myself that when I engage in any sort of training, whether it is transitioning to a new aircraft or making sure I am proficient in the ones I fly regularly, I will insist on some night IMC work, simulated or actual.
After the cordial introductions and some book learning, my "5 percent IMC" instructor put me in the airplane and had me go through the paces, including holding patterns and precision and nonprecision approaches. I flew well enough to satisfy the instructor, but it was all done in the bright light of day VFR. Next time we meet for recurrency training, I'll have a question for the teacher: "What percentage of your time is night IMC?"
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