Starting (or Rather) Re-Starting IFR Training

I think I'm sort of a restless person. I'm never seem to be content with where I am. I always want to work toward something. Awhile back, I started thinking about a master's degree. Then the opportunity presented itself with the company at which I was working at the time. Basically, they offered a master's degree through a partnership with Texas Tech University.  Not the best engineering school in the world and not necessarily my first choice, but a respected school nonetheless, and it was free.  After 13 months of coursework and another 4 of writing a master's report, I finished my goal. After that, I needed a break from learning... from school... from everything.

A couple years later, I was getting restless again. And the possibility of flight, which had always fascinated me, presented itself.  I took it, and through months of training and preparing, I earned my Private Pilot Certificate.  Once again, I was content and wanted to relax and enjoy my hard work.

Now it's another year or two later and I was getting restless. There was no questioning what I would do.  I decided to start working toward my IFR rating.  I've been told it's the most difficult to obtain and I was up for the challenge. Unfortunately, my pocketbook was not. I was between jobs and trying to survive and had to sacrifice the training. To be honest, my head wasn't in it anyway. So now, a year later, I've got a great job and things are stable, and my latest desire has me wanting to build an airplane. As much as I want to dive in head first on the airplane, I know it's going to take a greater commitment than I've ever undertaken on a project or goal before, so before I try to do that, I need to put first things first.  I'm going to get that IFR rating.

A couple of things are helping. There's a company available that has one of the first full-motion simulators available for single-engine piston aircraft that would charge only $75/hour for time (I could bring in my own instructor) and could log up to 20 hours of time toward my instrument rating in the simulator. I may take advantage of that 20 hours, along with taking advantage of practicing with safety pilots.

With that, I thought I would talk a little bit about some of the initial things one works on when starting training for an IFR rating. Keep in mind that anyone training for an IFR rating is already a private pilot. In any event, the pilot in training dons a view limiting device to obscure the view outside to cockpit and you spend a much time as it takes to hold an altitude and hold and heading.  It sounds easier than it is.  The Instrument PTS specifies that the pilot will maintain altitude ±100 feet during level flight, maintain heading ±10 degrees, airspeed ±10 knots, and ±5 degrees of bank angle. So essentially, every lesson will be an exercise in maintaining those standards, but for the first lesson, it's best to concentrate on maintaining heading, altitude and bank angle with standard rate turns.