are you legal to fly ifr this is a question that has a many part answer so let's get into everything that goes into making sure you and your aircraft are legal to conduct an ifr flight first what does it take to get your ifr rating many of us get our rating under part 61 after having completed the private pilot certification here's 61.65 d of the far showing the aeronautical experience requirements to be eligible for the check ride the general requirements are mainly based on hours of experience starting with the need to have conducted at least 50 hours of cross-country flight time as pilot in command cross-country flights are defined for these purposes as taking off from one airport and landing at a second airport which is a straight line distance of 50 or more nautical miles away next up is a requirement for 40 hours of time and actual or simulated instrument conditions there are two ways to get this experience as an instrument student working on your rating the first is to fly with a cfwi this can be either an actual imc which is terrific experience or with the view limiting hood on in vfr conditions or in a simulator such as an advanced aviation training device like the redbird the second is to fly with a safety pilot someone who is at least a private pilot who can serve as pilot in command and be your eyes outside while you fly with the hood on time and instrument conditions means exactly that if you fly a two-hour flight with your instructor or safety pilot but only have the hood on or in the clouds for an hour of that time it only counts as one hour of instrument time towards the 40. now of these 40 hours at least 15 have to be instruction received from a cfwi in other words an instructor who has an instrument add-on rating on their instructor certificate so the faa wants at least some of those 40 hours of instrument time to be with an instructor rather than most of it with your buddy flying a safety pilot there are also specifics about what you need to do in those 15 hours of instruction three hours of the 15 has to be within two calendar months of your check ride date this is so you have some current training before the big day there's also a requirement to do what's sometimes called the long ifr cross country this is a cross-country flight that's a total of 250 miles along airways or direct routing from atc which we take to mean on an ifr filed flight with an instrument approach at each airport and using three different kinds of instrument approaches here's an example of a long ifr cross country we often do starting from college park maryland we'll fly to atlantic city new jersey from there we'll head south to salisbury maryland and then return back to college park we'll file the entire flight ifr either in three different segments or as a so-called round robin the entire distance is 270 miles will satisfy the three different approaches requirement by shooting the vor in atlantic city the ils and salisbury and the arnav at college park work with your instructor to develop an ifr flight that satisfies these rules in your area so now let's look at the 40 hour instrument time requirement if you've just finished your private pilot you probably remember that you've done at least three hours of instrument training as part of those requirements the good news is that you can count that time towards the 40 hours even if your private instructor wasn't a cfwi let's add that time in also all of this time we've flown with the instructor the general training the long cross country the three hours before the check ride that was all instrument time so it counts up here as well the rest of the 40 can be with your instructor or with a safety pilot the 50 hours of cross-country time has to be as pilot in command so any cross-country flying you did with your instructor before getting your private doesn't count here but that solo cross-country time you had to do at least five hours of it does count towards those 50. these are complicated requirements so let's look at an example of a student's journey towards the rating the hour thresholds again are 15 hours of instrument training with the cfwi 40 hours of instrument experience and 50 hours of cross-country pic in addition to those hour requirements we have two specific boxes we need to check there's the long ifr cross country with the instructor and the three hours before the check ride our student comes in with a private pilot so has at least the three hours of instrument time and five hours of pic cross country time this student will now do 26 hours of flight training with their cfwi and to be smart about it will make each flight across country this doesn't have to be too much of an inconvenience we can pick an airfield close to 50 miles away do a quick touch and go and then do our air work and head back anyways what this does is fulfill three requirements at once we have the instrument time with the instructor which puts us over the threshold for those 15 hours and we have the instrument experience and cross-country pic time covered remember even though your instructor is with you now that you're a private pilot you're logging pic time on each flight some of you might look at this and say this is too much instructor time it goes way over that 15 hour threshold but remember that that's a minimum your instructor is going to move you on to the check ride when you're both ready so generally speaking most students will log more than those 15 hours of time next up is the long cross country we'll say it's four hours under the hood it meets all three of those hour categories and it checks the box for the cross country now you can't do all your flying as training at some point you gotta have some fun so this student will do 15 hours of cross-country flying just with their family which will put us over the cross-country threshold in order to round out the instrument time they'll be four hours under the hood with a safety pilot and those three hours in advance of the truck ride which also checks that last box and gives this student all the required experience obviously actual experiences will vary with more or less instructor time or other as needed students conducting their training under part 141 may be able to satisfy their requirements with fewer hours those are listed in appendix c to part 141 now once you got your instrument rating there's a matter of keeping it current similar to the requirement for a flight review 61.57c details what's needed to keep the instrument rating current first of all in the last six months you have to have performed at least six instrument approaches and have done holding procedures and intercepted and tracked courses and this last one is assumed given that you've flown instrument approaches using some kind of navigation guidance so on the day of your ifr flight you should do a look back if in the last six months you can count one hold and six approaches in actual or simulated instrument conditions you're legal to fly ifr that day if you have to look further back than six months to find those six approaches in the one hold you're not legal and you need to hit the sim or grab a safety pilot or cfdi and get current also if it's been more than 12 months since you've counted those tasks you'll need to take an extra step which is to do an instrument proficiency check or ipc an ipc is like a mini check ride that you can do it with a cfwi instead of needing an examiner the instrument acs which is your playbook for the checkride lists the required tasks for an ipc for example area of operation 3 task b here is holding procedures at the bottom of this page it lets us know that an aatd like a redbird can be used for some of the ipc but we still need an airplane for certain tasks like the circling approach and landing from an approach once we got the ipc out of the way we're legal again for ifr for another six months it's one thing for you to be legal for ifr it's another for the aircraft you're flying to be legal also in private we learned about required equipment for day and night vfr flight to be ifr legal we'll need some additional equipment an attitude indicator a turn coordinator an inclinometer or ball a directional gyro radios and nav units such as vors or gps that are suitable to the route we intend to fly a clock and a source of power like a generator or alternator notice what's missing the vsi is the only instrument out of the big six that isn't required for vfr or ifr flight some of this equipment has to be inspected on a regular basis as well in addition to inspections required for vfr flight ifr requires inspections every 24 calendar months on the static pressure system the altimeter and the altitude reporting system in the transponder or the mode c functionality of the transponder these are referred to as the 91.411 checks as this maintenance sign-off shows also we need to inspect the vors every 30 days if we intend to use them on our flight pilots can do this themselves in one of several ways depending on how precise the method we use to check them is we have a maximum allowable error of either plus or minus 4 degrees or plus or minus 6 degrees the first test is called the vor test signal or vot if we look in the back of the chart supplement we can see airports that have vots the basically special vor signals used just for these tests here's one at bradley in connecticut from any point on the field we can set the vor frequency in 111.4 and we should be able to twist the obs to zero and have the needle centered with a from indication also if we twist to 1 8 0 it should center with the 2 indication these indications will be the same no matter where on the field we are so it's not for navigation just for testing another test we can do is a vor checkpoint which does use an actual vr used in navigation we'll look at the same page in the chart supplement and see that there's one in wilmington delaware the g means it's on the ground it tells us a specific place on the field to test this out it's at the hold short for runway 9 on taxiway kilo so from there we'll tune to the frequency of 114.0 and the supplement told us that if we twist 285 we should have the needle center with a from indication next up we can do an airborne check these are a bit less precise so we have a 6 degree error tolerance we'll find airborne checkpoints in the chart supplement 2. here's one over the field in farmville virginia the a 1600 means this is an airborne point and we should fly over the point the intersection of the runway and taxiway at 1 600 feet and at a setting on the obs of 257 we should get the needle centered and a from indication so here we are at that altitude about to cross over midfield we'll have the frequency set up and 257 set on the obs over midfield we should see that indication to complete the check the last two checks are a dual vor check where we'll check the indications of one vor off of those of a second and a check along a victor airway for the dual vor check we'll use the groton vor as we fly southbound down the connecticut river we'll set up the frequency into our nav1 and nav2 and the obs setting that centers both of the needles should be the same give or take four degrees now from here we can roll into our final test the airway check if we look at the sectional we notice that victor 16 here the zero five seven radial from the calvitin vor across line island sound crosses over a prominent visual landmark the mouth of the same connecticut river if we tune to the calverton vor set the obs to 057 when we overfly the mouth of the river we should expect to see the needle centered with the from indication this is a bit of an imprecise check so the tolerance is plus or minus 6 degrees whatever vor check we do it needs to be recorded in a log kept onboard the aircraft indicating the date and place of check the degree of error and signed with the pilot's name oftentimes we don't plan to use vors for ifr and will rely on gps navigation when this is the case we'll need to make sure our navigational database is up to date the initialization screen on most units will show the effective date of the database and if it's expired it'll need to be updated so this is a rundown of what all goes into making an ifr flight legal oftentimes you'll need to answer if both the pilot and aircraft are legal and current for ifr flight and these are parts of that long answer if you're not busy right now why don't you keep your training going by watching some of these videos here and you can subscribe to stay up to date on all the new releases and training articles that are coming out and more head on over to the website flight dash insight.com to really kickstart your flight training