I don't recall ever reading this book, but as a student pilot, I was given a copy of "You have 178 seconds to live" and it had a tremendous impact on me.
https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/field_offices/fsdo/fai/...
https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/field_offices/fsdo/fai/...
So a VFR pilot is trained in some of the basic instrument reading things needed for low visibility flight. But there’s a lot more expertise involved in safely flying instruments than in visual flight. Precise, mentally demanding procedures, multitasking. VFR pilots are also required to learn about why instrument flying is so much more difficult. A big part of the reason is spatial disorientation[1]. Your senses tell you one thing while the instruments tell you another. And the scary part is that when the equipment fails, sometimes it’s your senses that are more correct. Pilots either blindly following their senses when their senses are wrong, or ignoring their senses when their instruments are wrong— both of those kill people.
To compare flying in a real small plane versus a simulator: When you go into a stall in a small plane, the feeling of dropping feels a lot like a roller coaster, with your stomach coming up into your mouth. That woozy feeling is much the same. And certain kinds of weather can cause a similar rapid change in elevation even without you changing the attitude of the plane. The small plane is so much more (potentially) wild than a big jet, it’s a bit more like being in a flying lawnmower. A simulator does teach lots of the skills you need to know, and is especially useful for establishing muscle memory for things like instrument scans and other procedures. Then doing that in a real plane is like doing the same thing, but on a wild roller coaster, and with the full knowledge that if you mess up you’ll die.
You should go for a ride! Tons of places offer very cheap introductory flights where you get to take the controls for a bit during that first flight.
Basically, you close your eyes while the instructor tosses the airplane all over the sky for a couple minutes in an attempt to get your inner ear fluid sloshing around to disorient you, then puts the airplane into a state where, e.g., you're in a deep stall, nose up, turning left, then instructs you to open your eyes and determine the airplane's attitude from reading the instruments. Once you have the attitude correctly described, then you return it to straight & level using instruments.
This was actually some of the most fun I had during pilot training. It was like a puzzle under stress (you only have so long before you hit the ground) figuring out what the airplane was doing and describing how to get out of the situation.
The point of teaching this to VFR students is to prevent the "178 seconds" situation so you will hopefully have enough instrument experience and calmness to turn the airplane around and get back into clear air.
The point of the article is to drive home the point that using your normal human instincts and feelings will kill you in that situation. You can be completely inverted and feel just fine. Only trusting what the instruments say will get you out of trouble (edit: and cross checking them to be sure you don't rely on a failed instrument).
And actually, the situation can deteriorate faster than you realize. I recall days with my instructor where, while it was technically VFR flight, it was so hazy that I spent a lot of time using instruments because I couldn't see the horizon very well.
In the U.S. we are required to give at least 3 hours of instrument training for Private Pilot license. There is no such requirement for Sport Pilot or Recreation Pilot License
In my experience teaching hundreds of private, instrument, and commercial pilots 3 hours is not enough to develop any kind of instrument proficiency. For people who take the instrument rating course it usually takes around 20 hours to develop minimal instrument proficiency. Simulator training helps a lot when done with a qualified instructor who understands how to teach instruments in a sim (unfortunately many don't). But even the students who nail the sim portion often struggle in the real aircraft when they are faced with task saturation.
There's some physiology to explain this, but one key point is that once you're in a coordinated turn, even a descending one, your weight is still going straight down the vertical axis of the seat. So, you'll think you're doing fine, and possibly even pull the turn tighter (the graveyard spiral), and fixate on things other than the attitude indicator and your plummeting altitude.