I love flying,
In answer to your question:
“If you don't mind me asking, how many hours did it take you to gain your IMCr? It would be useful to have an idea so that I can budget my finances and time accordingly. Also, I would be interested to hear the average frequency of your lessons, and how much groundschool you needed. The book suggests 20 hours ”
It took me 27 IMC hrs I think – which goes up when you add on the 0.2 or whatever per flight for the time on the ground / taxing / taking off / landing etc (so a 1hr flight I recorded as 0.8 IMC hrs)
I thought I was pretty regular in terms of flying frequency – I started back in November and passed mid April. Being married and with a job in London, I can only get out at the weekends and trying not to be too selfish I found myself going to the club roughly every other Saturday (where we managed two flights, flight time of 9/10 and 11/12 or something)
One issue I had was familiarization with a certain type of plane
I often found myself in quite a few different complex planes for reasons out of everyone’s control, which in fact was great experience in itself, and I ended up taking the test in a retractable turbo arrow, but there is no doubt that identifying a plane that is right for your needs and sticking with it, will help make the whole process a little more straight forward
There is enough going on without worrying about finding the squelch knob or some other trivia thing as you launch into a cloud, which very quickly compounds your work load (and your instructors patience)
Regarding ground school – if you mean the exam that you need to sit, I just read the book once and then went over the imc confusor a few times and then sat the test – pretty straight forward
In terms of ground school with my instructor – he would call me or I would call him during the week to discuss the general outline of what we were to do on the Saturday (if it was an approach somewhere, say Bournemouth, this gave me a chance to load up the approach on flight sim and have a go)
We then sat down on the day itself and went over the plan before the flight and again post the flight we would sit down over breakfast and go over what often went wrong etc.
I found the whole experience to be invaluable and genuinely feel very happy to have done the rating
That was just my experience
Good luck
Nick