KingCooky
Thank you. I tried to keep it concise and to the point.
You will find the Europeans are quite strict on this stuff, although of course they use the semi circular rule. They expect you to fly at the corect level when you are VFR, although they have a different concept of IFR to us.
In reality if you are OCAS in the UK frankly no one much cares whether you are IFR or VFR and in VMC or IMC. Some would argue you create a greater danger by complying with the quadrantal because if you think about it, it confines all the traffic to the same levels. This means if any one is flying at the wrong level (because they have stupidly misinterpreted the rule) you have a far greater chance of a collision. For this reason some would say that the airspace users would be better relying on the big sky theory to keep them safe and fly at all sorts of different levels. Moreover in my experience on IFR days there are plenty of pilots not complying with the quadrantal rule for reasons best known to themselves but I would guess including because they are not aware the rule applies to them.
