Flying Blind

Imagine: you're driving your car down the highway going 90+ MPH and there's nothing but you and the open road. Sounds fun, right? Now imagine this situation, and you happen to drive straight into a fog cloud and you can no longer see what's going on down the road, let alone 10 ft in front of you. How would you react? What would you do? In a car, the safest option would easily be to slow down to maybe 25 MPH as you wind your way along the road. However, if this situation were to happen while flying a plane, it would hardly be this easy.

When you're hundreds of feet in the air travelling 100+ MPH, slowing down isn't exactly an option...if one were to slow down to 25 MPH in the air, they would more than likely stall the plane and basically fall out of the sky. When weather conditions like flying into a cloud arise in flight, there are a few options for private pilots, as they aren't allowed to fly into clouds (which requires an instrument rating), the simplest option being a 180 degree turn to get out of the weather or clouds that you just flew into.

In order to prepare to fly into these conditions if a situation like that ever arises, the FAA requires that three or more hours of simulated instrument time must be completed. The one object that makes this training possible is what's called "the Hood."

Not me pictured here, but this is the same sort of Hood that I used during training

The Hood is a half cone-shaped piece of plastic that fits around your head with an elastic band and forces you to fly while only looking at your instruments, as it blocks all outside views.

All you'll really see while flying under the Hood

When your only way of gathering information about what's going on outside is your instruments, you need to maintain a vigilant scan of those instruments to make sure that your plane is staying on the heading you want and at the altitude and airspeed that you want. If any adjustments need to be made in terms of heading, altitude or airspeed, they need to be subtle and carefully executed for a couple of reasons. Most important of these reasons is: you want to make sure that while performing any maneuvers (turns, climbs) you maintain a scan - any movements that are too fast would prevent you from maintaining your scan of the instruments and making any proper, timely adjustments

While some may find the aspect of flying under the hood a bit of a hassle because of the possibility of vertigo, I actually found it pretty fun. When you fly without any outside views and it feels like only you and your plane flying along, you feel much more a part of the plane than if you were to fly with a view. The fact that you have to explicitly trust in what your instruments are telling you compared to what your body is telling you is an incredible feeling and something that I can't wait to have again if I ever start my instrument rating training. 

Another big part of instrument flying is VOR navigation as discussed in my previous post. GPS has also become a major player when it comes to instrument flying as it's become more and more precise, with many approach procedures now using GPS as a primary source of navigation. Both of these navigation methods are essential when flying blind, as there is no way of navigating using any visual checkpoints that private pilots normally use. 

While flying blind may not sound fun to some of you, chances are that you've been on a commercial flight where your friendly Captain and First Officer (copilot) have been descending through thick clouds to land when they only have their instruments available to them for reference. A quick YouTube video can be seen below with the pilots using what's called an ILS or Instrument Landing System. Don't worry though, chances are that you'll most likely never be on a commercial flight where the visibility is that bad...

ILS LANDING VIDEO HERE

Diagram of an ILS - the plane more or less follows the crosshairs down to the runway, usually on a glideslope of approximately 3 degrees

Frankly, the thought of basically flying a final approach without being able to see anything at all would definitely give me an incredible adrenaline rush, and it's absolutely something that I'd like to do some day as a pilot. Those that know me know that I'm not really a huge risk taker or "adrenaline junkie," but this is something that I would no doubt love to do.

While I'm not able to shoot any approaches like this in real life (for now...), I am able to practice them to some extent on the Flight Simulator that I have on my computer...more on that in my next post!