6 pages of well-intentioned argument, confused thinking, reliance on clearly poorly drafted secondary legislation, arguments where the antagonists are at crossed-purposes, and downright unwillingness to see the wood for the trees. Surprisingly, I learned quite a bit.
Frankly, the only time that matters in airline flying is time on type. If you're flying scheduled pax around, anywhere in the world, you'll almost certainly be flying according to IFR regardless of the weather or time of the day. VMC or IMC is irrelevant except insofar as it prompts you to turn on the TAI, change the landing gate or select a different approach plate.
As far as I'm concerned the quoted rule which mentioned recording time spent in 'IFR conditions' is a red herring and the sort of poor drafting, at worst, or outdated terminology, at best, that causes unnecessary debate. One can only guess what the draftsman intended. Akin to much of the JAA ATPL syllabus, one can only imagine it's a phrase which was translated eight times before written down in English.
IFR means the rules. It implies operating under a FPL. Note, flying a FPL doesn't imply flying IFR.
IFR conditions is a nonsense, but could be intended to mean the weather conditions in which VFR flight is not legal.
Instrument Flight is clearly intended to mean 'actual' Instrument Flight, which has been described as being a more accomplished form of flying. I'm not sure who does this?
Seeing as almost all professional airways flying involves a magenta line created with reference to instruments, whether that line is followed manually, with FDs or by the AP, I can only presume that actual Instrument Flight is in fact raw data flying? Bully for you if your airline encourages this.
So, where are we at? Log IFR if your FPL is predicated on IFR. Don't if it's a VFR FPL. Simple. But what's the point? Anyone employing you for an airline job will assume you fly IFR because everyone does. Time on type is all they care about.
If you're training for an initial IR Rating, flying mixture of VFR and IFR in GA or bizjets, or your logbook is more of a hobby than your flying, log your 'actual' Instrument Flying hours, minutes and seconds if you feel like it. These days very few people will care and as this thread proves, very few people will understand the difference.
Now, let's have the same discussion about PICUS...
