Jonathan,
I am a 'pre-IFR' student myself and had started a somewhat 'rigorous'
self-training routine since last Christmas. My current plan is to pass
the written by the end of this month while getting some official IFR
training so that I will be ready for an intensive 7 days or so East
Coast or West Coast IFR trip (http://www.dsflight.com/new-england.html
or http://www.ifrwest.com/enrollment_westcoast.html) or a similar
accelerated training program to get the rating in the spring.
Since both my husband and myself plan to get the instrument rating
this year, we have quite a 'library' of instrument training books. We
have probably every book which I found recommended at
rec.aviation.student etc. with the exception of Jeppesen book (based on
my bad impression with the Jeppesen private pilot training series and
of course its high price). Rick, my husband, started his training about
a year ago and had pretty much read all the books (he passed his
written last summer scoring something like 98). The Gleim Instrument
Pilot FAA Knowledge Test is probably the cheapest and most efficient
way to prepare for the written (I had just completed the book in two
weeks and have scored 95 to 100% on all the online practice tests at
http://www.exams4pilots.com/ and http://www.webexams.com/).
For IFR knowledge gaining purpose, Rick recommended me to use Bob
Gardner's The Complete Advanced Pilot with more in-depth information
from Trevor Thom ASA-PM3 Instrument Flying. For practical IFR
learning, Rick liked 1) Mastering Instrument Flying by Sherwood Harris
and Henry Sollman 2) Ralph Butcher's Instrument Pilot Flight Training
Manual and 3) Peter Dogan's PIC's Instrument Flight Training Manual
(listed in the order of his preference). I have read only a chapter or
two of each book but generally agree with his recommendations.
For flight simulations, we started with MS FS 2002/04 and gave
X-plane a brief try. After seeing that the Elite FS is used by a nearby
flight school, we decided to buy our own version along with an IFR
training book ($190 or so for the program and $50 for the book). I
completed the training book in about two weeks practicing an hour or so
everyday. In our experience, this is probably the cheapest and most
efficient way for IFR training on your own. We wished that we had
purchased this program earlier. It would have made Rick's earlier
official training with an instructor much more efficient. Regarding the
FS hardware, we used to use a Thrustmaster joystick but had replaced
with a CH flight yoke and found it a bit closer to 'real' flying in our
Cardinal C177B.
Rick's last two lessons with an instructor was last fall where he
had to do the entire IFR cross country trips which left him completely
exhausted at the end. The extra pressure was ATC communication in
busy airspace. Although we have some experience with ATC communications
(our home base is at a D and we have done quite a bit of cross country
trips with flight following going to or through C and B airspaces), we
decided to increase our ATC exposure by listening to NY approach 132.75
on our IFR practices (serving as safety pilot for each other) and
purchased 1) Comm 1 IFR Communications Trainer 2) Comm1 IFR Clearance
on Request and 3) Jeppesen ATC Clearance Training Audio Tape.
In summary, after spending about 5 weeks of serious pre-IFR
training (3 weeks with the Elite FS, 2 weeks with the Gleim book), I
feel that I have a pretty good overall exposure to IFR training. I am
quite confident that I would meet my goal of passing the IFR written at
the end of this month and get the rating in the spring. BTW, we did
our IFR practice yesterday with VFR tracking, NDB tracking and NDB
approach. It was the first time that I actually completed a NDB
approach. I was a bit comprehensive in having to descend so fast for
landing and had to slip quite a bit but the landing was good. I
repeated the approach on the simulator last night refining all the
steps and added some crosswinds. Next time, I will make sure to get
more simulator time before the real flying.
Hai Longworth