5 years. A lot has changed since my last blog post 5 years ago. Most notably, I've stopped being a poker player and have instead got my private pilot certificate. I'm a pilot. If you want to see me in action, I post videos about things I've done on my youtube channel.
But I'm just going to completely ignore the fact that my entire audience of (checks notes) zero readers has not been caught up on where I stand and just assume you know everything up to this point. Fair? I dunno. Hard to be unfair to all none of you.
So I got my instrument rating. And,
I
Love
It!
There's a saying I heard: a private pilot's certificate lets you fly 4 out of 10 days. And an instrument rating adds 4 more days. I don't think that's really accurate. At least around where I live, I can probably fly without an instrument rating 5-6 out of 10 days. And my instrument rating adds maybe 1-2 days to that. But that's in part because I'm a pretty low time instrument pilot. As I gain experience, and push my personal minimums lower, I suspect I'll be able to get to 8-9 days out of 10 that I can fly. I will never get to 10 out of 10 days. The airlines - with metric tons more flying experience than me - still have weather delays.
And an example of that was a trip I took to visit some friends in New York recently. On the way back home there was wide spread low clouds that would have made flying without an instrument rating basically impossible. But my instrument rating gave me an opportunity to fly above the low clouds, below the high clouds. Not only did this allow me to get home, I got to see views like this:
