"Scott Schluer" wrote
I would grumble also! I'm not IR (nor have I even begun IR training yet) but
it stands to reason that if you're being tested for competency as it relates
to flying in IMC and you run scared from actual IMC during your checkride
due to fear of failure or whatnot, you're not ready for it.

I think there are two ways to look at this.

On the one hand, I buy it. When I took my IR ride, I was fully
prepared to do it in actual. I was in fact flying a non-precision
circling approach, to mins, within days of taking the ride, and I got
in. The guy behind me missed the approach.

On the other hand, that flight scared the crap out of me - and it had
nothing to do with my skills and everything to do with how unsuitable
my airplane was for hard IFR. By the time I shot that approach, I
pretty much had to get in. I had enough fuel to make my alternate,
but not much more - dealing with carb icing had eaten into my
reserves. On top of that, my alternate was down to 300 and 1, and it
was the best thing going - people were waiting to get in there. My
plane lacked the range to get out of the weather system which went
bad.

There was no ice, no T-storms - the IMC was benign - but it was still
pretty dumb. I made it because I was good enough to get in right at
mins, and because I used the GPS to supplement the VOR. I also had to
maneuver very carefully to proceed from the MAP (literally - I did not
see the runway until directly over the runway and with only seconds to
go on the clock) to the numbers while remaining clear of cloud,
because I broke out in a hole.

Basically, because of my flying skills and familiarity with my
airplane all was well, but if I had used good judgment I would not
have launched IFR in the first place. My airplane was unsuitable. It
should have told me something when a much more experienced pilot (the
ferry pilot for a famous aerobatic performer) who was flying a much
better IFR mount opted to scud run instead. And my airplane was a
Tri-Pacer - 4 place, 100 kts, 4 hour endurance - typical of the
standard IFR trainer.

Just because the IMC is supposedly flyable - meaning you're not going
to be falling out of the sky with ice on your wings or getting chewed
up by a T-storm - doesn't mean it's OK to fly hard IFR in a plane with
poor speed, range, and redundancy. It will be fine if nothing goes
wrong, but things do go wrong.

Quite often, refusal to take the average instrument trainer into IMC
is not a matter of low skill, but of good judgment. My last
instrument student took his ride in actual hard IFR. He passed. But
it wasn't in a rental. It was in a plane with reasonable speed,
range, and redundancy.

Michael