Instrument hours and Night hours
 

Quick question from a mil guy looking into part 91/135 jobs. Many companies have pretty high “actual instrument” time requirements. I don’t have a whole lot since I was a fighter/trainer guy.

Do night hours count as actual instrument hours? All my night hours were under IFR.

Thanks!

AFAIK there’s a ruling or interpretation from FAA council on what constitutes “Instrument time”.
Like night time over water or sparsely populated areas with little or no visual reference.

There is a 1984 letter that is not in the Chief Counsel's electronic data base. Look up Carr letter or FAA moonless night letter.

I don’t know how you log time with military ops, but seems like you’d count the time where you flew by “reference to instruments”? No need to be in IMC. Obviously CAVU is not by instrument, but a dark night could be.

An old rule of thumb was about 10% of the time, but ideas on that are all over the map.

Actual instrument time is that time spent operating by reference to instruments. Whether or not you're under IFR is irrelevant as you can be in visual conditions or instrument conditions while operating under VFR or IFR. Dark night over the atlantic, good chance you're in instrument conditions, and operating by reference to instruments.

That said, I never logged any of that time as actual instrument, given that it was invariably autopilot on and I wasn't really doing much beyond making the occasional radio call and monitoring. On a 7 hour leg, I might show a few tenths of actual instrument, even though the flight was conducted in what were unarguably instrument conditions.

I'd send it in as it shows on your annual flight records review, you'll have to bring that to the interview. Netjets seems to like "retired" military from what I see, they are going to be stealing away from the 65 year old retired airline guys as their failure rate in training is 2 to 1 of lower hour guys.