There are two parts to completing the Instrument Rating (IR):
- written
- practical
I chose to get ready for the IR written by doing it through correspondence through Tom Brenen. http://members.crcable.net/brengun/ I first went through the entire course... off and on for 24 months - not much progress because I didn't set a deadline for myself and there were no pressures in getting it done... I find that self study, especially in aviation, doesn't work unless you set a FIRM DEADLINE for yourself.
I set that firm deadline, two months at first, then reduced it to ONE WEEK(!) after I found myself procacinating. I had restarted my studies with Culhane books. It isn't a bad book - I found that I was quick to go through them because I was familiar with IR having gone through Brenen and from having done some IR flying with a friend of mine. I would allocate roughly 2-3 days per section for each of those six sections.
The Culhane comes with a test practice book - its a good idea to do all the tests as it really tests your understanding and you'll find that there are gaps in your knolwedge that you won't uncover unless you test yourself. I did six exams over two to three days after covering the Culhane book (3 hours an exam is the time limit, but it only took me an hour to an hour and half hours for each test) .
There are four parts to the exam - Air Law, IFR Flying, Weather and General. The Culhane book has the following components...
1. Air Law
2. Aviation Weather
3. Instruments and Navigation
4. IFR Charts
5. IFR Flying
6. Human Factors and Flight Operations
I complimented my review with the following sites which came in handy:
- http://www.langleyflyingschool.com/Pages/Classroom.html
- http://bathursted.ccnb.nb.ca/vatcan/fir/moncton/WeeklyTopics/Archives.html
- http://www.aopa.org/asf/online_courses/ (GPS and IFR related)
I got 84% on the exam - would have easily hit 90%+ had I not made some silly mistakes... but it was a tough exam, not for the faint of heart. I competed the exam in under 2 hours, but used the rest of the time to redo some questions and to think about questions I wasn't sure about.
The exam tests your understands - not memorization - although that's important too. There were a good 5-6 questions that were GPS related - considerting that there were only 50 questions, this is a lot! Also, I had never seen most of those GPS questons and had to do some educated guessing which worked out to be correct answers! I think that using a borrowed 2007 Culhane book to do a 2009 exam is partly to blame for that (if I had going through some online sources such as the ones on http://www.aopa.org/asf/online_courses related to GPS, it would have likely helped)
I took some notes on things that were tricky IFR material... things that were amost hidden in the books but were important material, and notes of items I had touble with in the exam - I'm going to post these notes in this blog - make sure you are familiar with it before you go write the test.
