For some deranged reason, my CFI decided we needed to file IFR, take off from Meigs, and fly straight through a squall line to get back to Glenview. He then spent the whole time yelling at me for not holding altitude when the up- and down-drafts exceeded our max rate of climb by an order of magnitude. I’d flown IFR with my dad a ton, but my dad wasn’t insane. Mind you, this was for my Private, not an IFR certificate. I still regret not telling him I was going home on the El and that he was welcome to “hold altitude” on his own.
Yeah,manually flying in a small plane in IFR conditions with big updrafts is difficult without a navigator. There’s a lot going on in the cockpit and any attention diverted from physically flying it makes it harder to maintain altitude.
Before GPS’s it was tough to maintain VFR minimums while looking at a map and triangulating a position.
I know my brother had IFR training, but he would never fly IFR. Once we wanted to land in Atlanta and there was a low cloud cover, although we were well above it. He was about to divert when he saw a hole in the clouds. We went into a 60 degree bank and spiraled down through the hole. Afterwards I figured we were under 2g acceleration (2 = csc 60). On another occasion we wanted to fly from Trenton to Atlantic City. The weather was clear, but the winds were heavy. We drove.
I’m late to the party, but (unsurprisingly), @Llama_Llogophile nailed it.
Two additional factors at least in the USA that were glossed over:
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To exercise the privileges of an instrument rating the pilot must have flown and logged a certain amount of actual instrument flight, or else simulated instrument flight (“under the hood”) in an actual aircraft with a safety pilot to maintain traffic lookout while the pilot’s vision is obscured. See FAR 61.57c: eCFR :: 14 CFR Part 61 -- Certification: Pilots, Flight Instructors, and Ground Instructors
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The airplane itself must be maintained to instrument flight standards. Which requires a lot of extra repetitive calibration to the instruments. I’ve told the story before, but for a few months I flew Grand Canyon air tours in these: Piper PA-31 Navajo - Wikipedia. The mission was VFR in VMC and the little “airline” that ran these dozen airplanes had no need to maintain IFR/IMC capability, so didn’t. The aircraft instruments still worked. Mostly. But there were … idiosyncrasies. All completely FAA legal. As long as we stayed out of the clouds and didn’t try to file or fly under IFR. See FAR 91.205 eCFR :: 14 CFR 91.205 -- Powered civil aircraft with standard category U.S. airworthiness certificates: Instrument and equipment requirements. and FAR 91.411 - .413: eCFR :: 14 CFR 91.411 -- Altimeter system and altitude reporting equipment tests and inspections.
All of the above costs money and time.
I don’t fly any more, but… When I got my private license, I wanted to go places, not just fly around the local area on nice days. I quickly learned that little airplanes aren’t much good for travel unless you’re instrument rated. I didn’t want to tackle really bad weather, but I wanted to be able to go (or more important, get back) if it got cloudy or rainy.
Here in southern California, there is often a marine layer (low clouds in off the ocean). It’s rarely more than a couple of thousand feet thick. It’s easy to punch through if you’re instrument rated but a complete show stopper if you’re not. I got my instrument rating within two years of getting my private.
And just as an aside, instrument flying is fun. Not in thunderstorms or ice, of course. It’s a great challenge, aviating, navigating, communicating, all at once. It is true, as has been said, you do have to practice. And shooting an approach to minimums and seeing the approach lights appear out of the clouds… pretty entertaining.
One impediment for me was the cost - I’d just spend my disposable income for over a year on getting a private license (Nowadays, apparently a lot more). IFR required even more training and more precision. The show-stopper was that in addition, it required regular recertification and air time. I was lucky to afford an hour or two a month, and during the winter it was certainly no fun. (Even way back when in Canada, to carry passengers with just a night rating required having done at least X night landings in the past 6 months or something like that. I forget how many hours you needed every 6 months to maintain a night rating.)
It seems to me IFR was only something to do if you were making this your full-time passion, unless you were flying for a living.
Some pilots get commercial and IFR ratings as a reason to keep flying and learning, which they love, or because they are completionists or just want to improve their skills.
I was working on my commercial and IFR when I lost my Cat 1 medical and had to stop. I had no specific intention of flying commercially except for a vague notion of maybe being a flight instructor on the side in the future, and my plane was not IFR capable, but I wanted to keep expanding my skills, being a better pilot, learning more about aviation, etc. Plus, you’re going to fly anyway, so why not do some learning instead of going for another $100 hamburger? It helped that flying was much cheaper then.