Michael wrote:

http://www1.faa.gov/fsdo/orl/files/advcir/P874052.TXT

Assuming that the average GA IFR flight plan leads to 30 minutes of
IMC (I know a lot of them are filed procedurally so I'm being
pessimistic) that still sounds like 1 accident in 20,000 hours. So it
sounds to me like 95%+ of the pilots who experience vacuum or gyro
failure are handling it without an accident.

That sounds pretty reasonable. As I just mentioned in another posting, the
report also mentions that all of the fatal GA accidents from vacuum failures
in their study period happened in high-performance aircraft with retractable
gear.

From what I've seen of GA IFR pilots, at most 10% are getting
recurrent training in partial panel operations to PTS standards.

In Canada, partial panel is not even part of the IFR flight test (though we
do learn it during training). On the other hand, we have to retake our
entire flight test every two years, and the examiner can always fail
something (including the AI) if he/she wants to. The other benefit is that
without the partial panel and unusual-attitude recovery, we can take our
flight tests in actual IMC, as I did.


All the best,


David