Worth mentioning that the claim of there having been just
one fatal accident involving a pilot
exercising the privileges of the IMCR came from the then head of licensing of the CAA, at a CAA/EASA conference c. 1/2008 where I was present and was taking detailed notes.
The claim did suprise a lot of people but nobody I came across was able to categorically refute it.
The CAA man said they went through the accident records back to the start of CAA records. I don't recall how far back it was.
I suppose one could arrive at different figures according to the criteria used. For example a fatal crash of an IMCR holder flying VFR would not count. Similarly for an IMCR holder flying an unpublished approach. Similarly for an IMCR holder flying an ILS in France. Similarly if the IMCR was lapsed. The only thing that would count would be a valid IMCR holder flying a published IAP in UK airspace, overtly under IFR.
A part of the lack of official data on the accident rate of the IMCR (safety = no accidents = no data!!
) is that once you get the IMCR, you renew it every 25 months with an instructor but he just signs your logbook; no paper is returned to the CAA. So the CAA has no good data on how many valid IMCR holders there are. They do know that something over 20,000 (the figure was mentioned at the conference) were issued in total since c. 1969.
My guess, from speaking to pilots at random and knowing (also from the CAA) that about 20,000 UK pilots have valid medicals and presumably are doing some flying) is that a few thousand are currently valid.
Every year, loads of VFR pilots kill themselves doing all kinds of stuff, some in IMC. But it is very very rare to hear of a PPL+IMCR killing himself by bodging an IAP, or in a CFIT.
It doesn't matter how you look at it or what assumptions you make; the accident rate of IMCR holders (once you exclude irrelevances like somebody killing themselves flying illegal IFR outside the UK, which frankly is done by plenty of VFR pilots too) does appear to be very very good.
One could argue, and I would agree, that the good safety record of the IMCR is due to much of the UK being relatively flat i.e. not Switzerland, or Nepal
But it is just possible that the stats are actually telling us that the level of flying competence required to deal with IFR is much lower than the regulators keep pretending
And I would be the first to agree with that. My son could fly an ILS on the sim at 12 and has flown a number of them on the bigger CPL training sims at flying exhibitions. And any monkey can fly headings and levels in IMC - assuming a level of cockpit automation appropriate to real-world IFR flight.