Personal Minimums
 

As a new IFR pilot I thought I should decide on some personal minimums required for flight into actual IFR. This is what I came up with for now, I plan to slowly lower the minimums as I gain experience. (most of my IFR flying will be in a basic minimum 91.205 equipped C172. I did all my training in a glass cockpit, autopilot equipped SR20. This is why some of my minimums are so high, due to the fact that I don't have any of the aids in my C172 that I had in the SR20)

Clouds Takeoff Minimums: >= 1000ft AGL
Visibility: >= 3 Miles
Fuel: 1 Hour Reserve After Alternate
Alternate WX 1hr before/1 hr after ETA: >=1000ft AGL 3 Miles Visibility
Sleep: 6 Hours or >
Currency in A/C: 2 hours in last month
Destination Minimums: 1000ft AGL 2 miles Visibility 1 Hour Before/After ETA
Known Icing: Cancel
Thunderstorms or CB Clouds: Cancel

I'm still working on them now. What do you all think of them? Too high? Too low? Just right?

Other Considerations
 

Those are well thought out and very reasonable. What about night? Will that change your mins? What's your definition of known icing - a PIREP or Forecast. Thunderstorms can be isolated, scattered, or embedded sometimes you can weave around them, sometimes you can't.

Congratulations!

I've never thought about night when making these! Would you say I should maybe add 500 ft and another mile on my minimums for night flight?

At WMU my CFI always told me to cancel if there were icing airmets/sigmets, PIREPS, or any other mention of ice along my route.

It is a very good start. The important thing is to adjust accordingly based on currency and proficiency with the aircraft you are flying.

I fly C172 and C182 aircraft regularly with the Civil Air Patrol. That said, if I'm solo in an aircraft that is not equipped with an autopilot, my own personal minimums preclude me from flying IMC at night when the weather is below 1000' and 3SM.

My minimums change on a sliding scale based on familiarity of airport/procedures/terrain, aircraft equipment and automation, day vs night, and the urgency of the trip. If there are factors that are pressing me to go (getthereitis), I automatically add 1/2 mile and 500' to my personal minimums.

The FAA has a good Advisory Circular and AOPA has some good training materials about creating personal minimums. As I stated before, one of the most important things to do is to continuously evaluate your minimums and adjust them accordingly. That said, your minimums should not change prior to a flight based on various factors affecting that flight (IE conveniently changing them to allow a "go" decision).

Yes. Ice and 172s don't mix.

Those are very good and well thought out minimums. More or less, they are what our school limits our students on for solo IFR cross countries. Although we determine "known ice" as visible moisture near or below freezing. So it could be OVC at 3,000 but 2 degrees at the surface and -4 aloft and we call that "known ice."

After one very bad encounter with ice, I have pretty strict personal limitation with ice - has to be forecasted 2 degrees above freezing at or above my maximum cruise. For instance, winds aloft are forecasted 3,6,9,12000 feet. So if I want to fly at 4,000 then the 6,000 has to be 2 degrees or higher throughout the entire route of flight AND forecasted period. I use to also have another part - the temperature ALSO had to be 2 degrees following standard lapse rate. So a flight at 5,000 feet would require it to be 12 degrees at the surface (10 degrees plus 2). With all that, I am VERY strict about ice. I don't even want to mess around.

Clouds and visibility? Generally I will go with just about anything. I'd like to have a "take off alternate" - that is an airport within 30 minutes that I am pretty sure I can get into. But if not, I say no lower than the highest minimum for the favoring runway. That way I have at least 2 systems to get in on if the airport is so equipped.

Like I said, I am MUCH more conservative about ice than clouds/visibility. I am much more confident in my IFR flying skills than I am in my iced airplane skills. In fact, skills really won't help too much when your aircraft is iced up. Therefore, I just avoid ice all together.

/soapbox

I wish WMU let students fly solo IFR flights. At WMU actual IFR flight is prohibited w/ out a CFI. We must have 3000ft and 5 miles to do a solo flight and less than a 10 kt crosswind.

That is a very reasonable system you have for ice. My CFI told me about a time he got a SR20 so iced up that he couldn't maintain altitude anymore, I plan to never have that happen to me!

My only reason for having a higher ceiling/visibility is that I have never done a approach before without the GPS and autopilot helping me (my cfi would yell at me if I tried doing a approach brief w/out the autopilot!) I anticipate my minimum ceilings/visibility to lower after some experience doing approaches without gps/autopilot aid.

Yea, changing the minimums before a flight would defeat the purpose of minimums!

I noticed you added this on to your message after I replied to you, My CFI always told me to never even get near even a scattered thunderstorm unless equipped with wx radar on the plane.

Well...it is a good thing that your CFI flies in a time when a lot of airplanes have such conveinences ;)
He might not have flown much **back in the day**! :o

Thunderstorms are obviously a huge weather threat, but follow the well established rules for Thunderstorm avoidance and you'll do well without having to hamstring yourself to a point where you would never fly in certain parts of the country.

Are you sure he didn't say EMBEDDED THUNDERSTORMS?
Now those buggers! WOW!

USMCFLYR

I get a little irritated when I hear that sort of stuff. I used to think our school was too conservative with solo IFR mins (used for building for commercial cert) being 2-3 miles and 3,000 feet (depending on local vs xc and dav vs night). But I've heard many schools do not permit solo IFR.

That worries me. I think of the day we send our students out to some ma and pa FBO with planes from the late 60s and they can go IFR solo for the first time. I want them to be in well maintained aircraft and after the flight being able to talk to a CFI about it because almost every solo flight a student comes back with a question.

AOPA has some good risk management tools, matrices which you can use to account for various risk factors to make a go-no/go decision.

The problem with just setting absolute minimums is that they may restrict you necessarily if all other factors and conditions are great for your flight. Then you will make an exception, and eventually your minimums will become meaningless. The matrix allows you to account for favorable conditions which may offset not-so-favorable conditions.

I agree with Rick.

Having 'personal minimums' is great and all... but in real life there are 100 different variables that you have to weigh. Having a good understanding of these variables and how they affect your decisions is way better than just setting 'personal minimums'.

I'll probably catch some flak for saying this but.....It may not be a bad thing to be pushed a little past your comfort zone... but it's also a fine line of being safe.


on a different topic, but relevant...I've heard similar arguments from CFIs about setting personal airport minimums for newly made private pilots - some say they won't land a 172 at an airport less than 4000' feet long, won't take-off with more than half the x-wind component of the aircraft. I don't really see too much sense in that. It seems like a lot of schools have gone almost overboard on making conservative decisions.. (i.e. training environments being extremely tightly controlled). Those students are used to having, say, an ILS and a 10,000' runway for an aircraft that can land in 700'.

ok that's enough useless information for now

I'm kinda with Ryan here... but everybody is different. Some guys need a nudge out of their comfort zone, and some need to be reeled back in a bit. Just don't limit yourself too much... there are lessons to be learned and valuable skills to develop out there.

I also would give different advice to a budding professional pilot than I would a weekend warrior. When you're flying a lot and training towards your commerical/CFI or even further, you're knowledge base is so dynamic that one flight may re-write all those 'personal minimums'. Conversely, you'll come back from a flight someday and say, "I never want to do that again"... hopefully you didn't exceed your ability, but maybe you just stepped to far outside your comfort zone. Be safe out there and have fun!

I like the above comment. If you never leave your comfort zone, you will never really "learn" about weather. There's doing this, and just being dumb. But honestly, not flying because an Icing Airmet? I hope you mean icing to the surface, or maybe into your cruise altitudes. But guess what, you can still go fly, just go lower. Experience what it's like to get stuck under/over a cloud deck.

When I was flying freight, I had several low-time folks fly with me, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to show them what flying is actually about, how to manage weather situations, etc... I wish everyone had this opportunity!

Let me reword this a bit, The minimums stated above are my personal minimums for when I'm the sole pilot on board. If I'm with a CFI or more experienced pilot then me I'm willing to go into much lower wx than I would if I was alone. My thought is that if I'm alone carrying my parents and sister or friends then that isn't the best time for me to go out and try things that I have very little experience with. I very rarely go flying just for fun as the sole occupant in the airplane, usually the plane is filled to capacity with fuel, baggage, and people

There was one time during my training when I got a wx breif and noticed that the TAF said "CB" in its forcast for the time period that I would be flying, I figured that would be ok because the radar showed just rain so I preflighted the a/c but then when I walked in to find my CFI and told him I was ready to go he looked at me wierd and asked why I was even thinking of going anywhere near CB clouds in a SR20 without wx radar. :mad: I was so angry cause I had just spent 45 minutes getting ready for the flight!

That's not true- each student gets a personalized card with their own weather minimums, and the ceiling can be as low as 1500 feet.

That's unfortunate, but not representative of most CFI's at WMU. I personally feel it's my duty expose my students to as much (safely) as possible, because I do believe that our school shelters students a bit too much. Again, kudos for getting experience outside of WMU.

I have been told before by several CFI's that we are strictly not allowed to do solo IFR flights no matter what our pq cards say.

You're correct- no solo IFR. But 3000 feet is not the minimum ceiling for solo flights.

Dude... I'm sorry...

I have never seen a pq card with lower minimums but the only pq cards i've seen are my other low time pilot friends. I assume that is why we all have that minimum. I should have done some more research before I assumed that was the minimum :)

Then you won't be doing very much flying in the southeast then or even in the middle of the country (OK and TX in this case) because there seems to be CBs popping up just about every afternoon ;)

In some ways - your CFI is right. You should not go ANYWHERE NEAR CB is any light GA plane - you should keep many miles away from them - and don't go flying under the anvil either :eek:

But to say that you won't fly at all if CBs are even mentioned in the METAR or TAF in a light GA airplane without weather radar is well......going to limit your opportunities.

I'm not advocating that you get out there and tangle with CBs in any way, shape, or form - but after you get some more experience outside of the training world (which often rightly have some pretty severe weather mins) - you'll see that you can make flexible, and yet still safe, go/no-go decisions.

USMCFLYR