This straight off the CASA websight;
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.
Doesn't seem to matter how dark it is!!
It will admit that for most of my career so far you were only allowed to log IF time when you were handflying...this 'providing input to the A/P' is a bit of a grey area and I never logged much I/F time while on A/P unless it was a coupled approach...I almost always handfly approaches anyway. I think a lot of people are abusing the rules and logging I/F time when they shouldn't be.
Note you must be in IMC to log I/F flight time....it mentions nothing about above FL210 and specifically excludes night in VMC or above cloud.
I may have underlogged my I/F time by perhaps 50 or 100 hours...there is at least another 500 hours of raw flight time I didn't log because of doing so many sectors a day we didn't log taxi time in PNG...average of say 8 sectors a day, 6 days a week for 10.5 months a year for 7 years of GA...you work it out.
Bottom line is for those of us who have been in the industry a long time there is a very discernable decline in the standards of many up and commers...not all by any means, I know some young guys/girls with less than 1500 hours that fly beautifully and have a wonderfull attitude to their chosen career, but a hell of a lot more have a wide gulf between their perception and the reality.
Companies like RFDS, which certainly sort the men from the boys, are IMHO going to be having more accidents in the future than they have had in the past.
The same situation existed, and to some extent still exists, in PNG. The general lack of movement in the industry through the late 80s ment that we all stayed flying Otters, Bandits etc for a long time...89 made it worse because 1600 guys were dumped onto the world market and therfore those of us that didn't scab stayed in GA a lot longer. In 94 when PX went on a hiring spree they virtually emptied PNG GA of experience. The average level of experience of my intake into PX was a little under 7000 hours with lots of turbine command, C&T, I/F time etc.
The same thing has happened in Australian GA (and Europe for that matter)...the airlines have emptied the industry of the best and brightest/most experienced etc. QF and
VB are still hiring apace...there really has been no discernable effect from 911 outside of the contigous 48 states as far as airline hiring is concerned. The one good thing about the boom & bust cycle of aviation through 50s,60s,70s and 80s was it gave the industry time to recover from airline hiring sprees...time to restock experience...that has not had a chance to happen in the last 8 or 10 years of fairly constant hiring.
The industry has been given a temporary reprieve with the demise of AN dumping(temporarily) a large number of experienced ex GA C & Ters, Grade 1 Instructors etc back into the sytem...but with China, among others, hiring more and more expats, mostly Aussies, and more Aussies taking a world view and moving offshore to make good money...aided by short sighted beancounters paying $hit money here...that situation is only temporary.
In my view there may never be another period like that between the mid to late 70s and the late 80s when the airlines hired virtually no-one, ever again...certainly not for a very long time with countries like China growing at a mad pace and requiring a helluva lot more pilots than they can train over the next 20 years.
The smart guys and girls will make best use of the experienced guys and girls comming back from Airline jobs and learn from them...they will get ahead quickly and are tomorrows winners...a far more vocal group seem to hold the view that the demise of AN and the percieved slowing of career advancement as stripping them of the god given birthright to a 'dream' airline job right bloody now...they are the ones cooking their books to get ahead unfairly...I have had to deal with more of them than you would credit in the last few years...they are characterised by the fact that the don't even know enough to know how much they don't know...they are the people who stab you in the back to steal your job...the ones who moan about wanting a command when they don't have the experience or skills to do the job, but of course view themselves as virtually infallible.
Chuck.
PS A bit off topic but I needed a rant