When the AOPA Air Safety Institute conducted its analysis of Accidents During Flight Instruction, many of its findings confounded expectations. The facts that helicopter students were far less susceptible to solo accidents than students flying airplanes, that two-thirds of all fatal fixed-wing accidents occurred during advanced instruction, and that the majority of those advanced instructional accidents took place during training not directed toward any future checkride all ran counter to intuition. But perhaps the most counterintuitive result was that among all forms of advanced instruction, both the largest number of fatal accidents and the greatest risk that an accident would prove fatal were attached to what we’d have characterized as the most benign curriculum: instrument training.
After all, instrument students are no longer beginners; they’ve acquired enough proficiency and experience to perform at the private pilot level. Most often they’re flying a model of airplane with which both they and their instructors are familiar, and the profile of the typical training flight stays squarely in the middle of the envelope. Aside from steep turns under the hood and the relatively few minutes spent learning to recognize and recover from unusual attitudes, all maneuvering is notably gentle, with turns confined (at least in theory) to standard rate and climbs and descents limited to 500 feet per minute.
That wouldn’t seem to leave much room to get into trouble, and in fact only three of 21 fatal accidents in a 10-year period were triggered by deficiencies in instrument flying per se. Five were midair collisions (including one between two airplanes both engaged in hood work); these made up a majority of all midairs during any form of advanced instruction during the period. Three more were caused by fuel exhaustion or starvation, and another by an incorrect mixture setting during a high-altitude takeoff. Four were stalls during landing attempts or circling maneuvers, four more involved collisions with obstacles in visual conditions, and one Cessna 172 spiraled into the water after its crew succumbed to spatial disorientation while trying to set up for a visual approach over the ocean at dusk.
In a sense, the accident record of instrument training reinforces the presumption underlying all IFR flight: You’re safest following clearances and executing procedures as charted, until a safe landing is assured.
Statistician and ATP David Jack Kenny fondly remembers instrument instruction as the most enjoyable training of his flying career.
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