Instrument flying in the real world
 

For those of you who have an IR, and are regularly using it other than as an instructor.......

Would you please tell me which type of approach you most commonly find yourself doing?
En-route nav also, what do you mostly use? Please feel free to expound!

Just curious, really, as I am brushing up my instrument flying skills with a vague thought of doing an IR at a later date. Always supposing I can find a suitable aircraft for hire and the money to hire it, that is. European input would be especially interesting.

If available prob 90 vectors because it is the least work load - why make it any harder than need be. If not the next best available. :)

Radar vectored ILS with other traffic getting out of the way...

(having a Helimed callsign helps a bit...)

Flying out of Jersey to both the UK and France I'd say:

99% radar vectored ILS - with a couple of DME arc to ILS procedural approaches (Waterford and La Rochelle) and a couple of NDP at Shoreham (with the 530 configured up using OBS mode)

En route all done with GPS - in France and Europe lots of directs provided to waypoints many many miles distant to cut legs (IO540 has some great writeups on his site about this).

Not many holds in real world flying, but would probably say 3 or 4 a year.

Most of the holds and procedural approaches and non-precision approaches generally done when going up for some refresher flying or in revalidation flights.

99% vectored ILS, in fact I can't remember the last time I flew a procedural approach at work!! Fly them when teaching.

Bose-X
 

You need to get out a bit more! lots of procedual stuff in the Greek islands (no radar) or visual.

But back to the question just like all above I find the vectors to the ILS the least stressful apart from a PAR if you can find one, the thing that I would practice is GPS approaches, they are the thing to come and you MUST be able to manage & understand the flight plan in the GPS box or you will get your descent point wrong.

Mostly RV ILS, but this is partly because when flying in/out of the UK to Europe, you have to head for a Customs airport every time and most of them are bigger places.

If you were flying intra-schengen, there would be a significant # of nonprecision GPS approaches outside the UK.

As A&C says, Greece likes the procedural ones. I got a bit of a suprise when the radar controller at Hania LGSA gave me a full procedural VOR approach :) I bet they don't do that with the F16s there; another 1000kg of juice burnt flying the outbound leg halfway across the thickness of Crete...

In practice, you head for an ILS every time you have a choice - even if there are GPS approaches available. Very very few GA planes have their IFR GPS approved for flying approaches, whereas any half decent IFR tourer can fly an ILS, on the autopilot, down to 200ft AGL.

I get out just plenty thanks. I just don't get to fly procedural approaches very often.

Whats the website address ;)

?

Just a minor observation:

Make sure you fly something under 2000kgs as the fees for IFR over that are simply INSANE

Thanks people, that was helpful.