The RFDS advertisements for pilots now require a minimum of 800 hours of Instrument Flight Rules time.
Just to refresh your memory:
Instrument Flight Time
All flight time during which the aircraft was controlled solely by reference to instruments may be recorded in the instrument 'Flight' column:
a) Time above overcast or at night in Visual Meteorological Conditions (VMC) is not counted as instrument flight;
b) In actual or simulated instrument conditions, only the pilot manipulating the controls or providing input to the auto-pilot may log all flight time as instrument flight;
c) A flight conducted on an Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) flight plan is not to be counted as instrument flight unless flying in IMC;
d) Instrument approaches are to be credited to the pilot (pilots, in the case of an airborne radar approach) manipulating the controls or providing input to the auto-pilot during the approach.
There wouldn’t be too many pilots in Australia with 800hrs IFR time.
You can ONLY log time IAW the above parra B.
Your average jet jock out of a ****ty day in Melb and into a ****ty day in Sydney, and then ONLY the manipulating pilot, can only log….10 – 15 minutes…maybe.
Now if he / she did the entire flight on foggles or similar, well I guess he / she could log that. But I would doubt many flights are conducted in that manner.
In fact, having a think about it, probably the highest time IFR time jock would be a certain helicopter pilot working on Hamilton Island.
He flies on contract mostly nights, over water on 100nm legs on an IFR plan obviously, and as it’s a helicopter, at low-ish levels ( less than 10,000ft) a good percentage of that in IMC, and he’s been doing that for more than 20 years, and when I flew with him, all hand flown. A living legend.
Mack