14 Day Instrument Rating

The 14-day Intensive Instrument Flight Training course is designed for those VFR-restricted Private Pilots who are tired of getting stuck away from home waiting for the weather to become VFR. It is also designed for the person who doesn’t want to waste a lot of time training once or twice on the weekends, taking over 6 months or longer to complete the training and spending additional time relearning past lessons.

The course starts out with Basic Attitude Instrument Flying. Maneuvers such as straight and level, climbs, turns, and descents are taught. These are the skills upon which all instrument flying is based. Flying a VOR hold is nothing more than flying level with two 180-degree turns while looking at a clock. Flying an ILS approach is nothing more than flying a constant heading and a constant rate of descent. These two examples have been somewhat over-simplified, but not by much as you will discover while practicing these procedures. The better you master these techniques the easier you will be able to fly a non-precision NDB approach down to minimums - the most demanding of all Instrument flying procedures.

We then move onto VOR navigation and all of its aspects, including intercepting and tracking radials, holding and approaches, and ADF navigation, tracking bearings, holding and approaches. After that come the precision approaches. We will conduct many different approaches at a number of airports, thereby demonstrating that most instrument approaches are the same barring minor differences due to terrain or obstacles.

Each training day is 8 hours long broken up into 4 hours of flying with approximately 4 hours of ground instruction. After flight training 4 hours a day for 14 days you will reach the required hours of instrument time needed to be eligible to take the checkride. If you have some logged instrument time when you begin the course then we will have some flexibility in the amount of time per day that we actually fly. Some homework will also be assigned each day that must be done.

This is not an easy-paced course. It does involve some studying and A LOT of thinking. When you have completed the course and passed your checkride you will feel the deep satisfaction that comes from knowing how much you have learned and just how much better a pilot you have become.