After taking a close look at accidents during advanced training—everything from flight reviews to aerobatic practice, where the pilot under instruction is already certified in the same category of aircraft—the staff at the Air Safety Institute was surprised to find that the single largest number of fatal accidents came in the regimen we’d expected to be one of the safest: instrument instruction. It accounted for more than 20 percent of all fatalities—as many as commercial, multiengine, and CFI training put together. More than 40 percent of all accidents on IFR training flights killed at least one person on board.
Given that almost all instrument flight takes place in the middle of the envelope—with standard-rate turns and gentle climbs and descents on routes carefully designed to avoid obstructions—this was startling. Digging into the details revealed other surprises, but also reinforced our initial presumption of the essential safety of instrument flight. It turned out that only 15 percent of the fatal accidents were caused by poor execution of the procedures themselves, and only 15 percent occurred in instrument meteorological conditions—not, by the way, the same 15 percent. In 10 years, only one fatal accident was caused by errors committed while in the clouds.
What caused the rest? Fuel mismanagement and takeoff or landing stalls in visual meteorological conditions led to 15 percent apiece, and a quarter resulted from stalls, controlled flight into terrain, or collisions with obstacles while flying by visual references (after breaking out or cancelling IFR). The most frequent fatal accident cause, however, was midair collisions. In 55 percent of all midairs on advanced training flights, at least one pilot was under the hood. Having the pilot being trained unable to see outside while the instructor doing the training watches the panel for airspeed, course, and altitude deviations clearly does mischief to the concept of “see and avoid.”
Midairs remain extraordinarily rare, although there’s some evidence that the risk is higher on instructional flights in general. If so, instrument training imparts most of that excess risk. Filing IFR flight plans isn’t practical during the early phases of learning attitude instrument flight, and it is a nuisance when simply practicing approach procedures. When flight following is available, though, it may be worth the effort.
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