longbow55
I agree, but as we were talking about DIY instrument approaches I assumed you were talking about somebody flying under IFR. Then, if you have legally descended sufficiently to become visual with the airport, you can cancel IFR and land there.
That is the bit which I was suggesting Americans have discovered too
There is no practical difference between that, and landing somewhere on a DIY IAP with a 1000ft DH.
In the UK, the only difference is that you don't need to cancel IFR because, in Class G, nobody much cares what rules you think you are flying under at any given moment.
I wasn't suggesting a flight that's illegal (outside one's license privileges) to start with, but now that you mention it:
I don't know how many Americans do the obvious
illegal thing which is to fly
VFR, perhaps on a plain PPL, and just drop into their home base through a bit (or a lot) of cloud. With the large number of highly equipped GA spaceships flying out there, some capable of flying a "virtual ILS" on autopilot, I would be rather suprised if nobody out there has discovered this option which would surely have the last 10 FAA administrators revolving in their graves at 2575 RPM. Of course no plain PPL in Europe has discovered this either...
But there are two very big differences: in the USA many small fields have an IAP of some sort (often GPS) and the FAA IR is far more accessible to private pilots without commercial aspirations than the JAA IR. So I would suspect that DIY approaches are a lot less common out there.