Ifr Certified

[kevin]

"IFR certified" is a aircraft saleperson term, as far as I know. There are equipment requirements for IFR, but they are very basic. As I recall, you must have:

-an altimeter, T&B, clock, artificial horizon, DG, and an electrical system. You must also have comm radios appropriate to the flight to be made.

Beyond that, technically, you can fly IFR with no nav radios at all, although you would have to work to find a situation where that would be legal, and I can't imagine it ever being wise. An example would be climbing up through an overcast on radar vectors I suppose.

The requirement that makes additional equipment necessary is that you must have all the nav equipment necessary to execute the procedure you plan to execute. So for an ADF approach, you have to have an ADF, for a VOR approach you have to have a VOR, etc. Same thing for IFR departure procedures. And then once enroute, you have to have some way to navigate, usually VOR or GPS (although other things are possible, e.g. INS).

There is, I think, some regulation related to GPS that requires you to have alternate nav equipment if you are using GPS for primary nav.

Anyway, there is more to this, but the bottom line is that "IFR certified" is a term that has no real meaning (except perhaps for the currency of pitot-static and transponder checks) when applied to an aircraft.

When a applied to a particular piece of equipment, such as a GPS, it has a specific and important meaning.

Kevin