- Joined
- Jun 17, 2017
- Messages
- 46
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- 34
Good evening,
After reading about all the crashes from vfr into imc, I felt I needed to share my experiences and my opinion on some of the training sessions I have watched and attended. I see a problem with some parts of the training approach used today. It seems like all training I have reviewed is about fear, things said like you will die in 90 secs etc. So on to my experience, it happened to me 20 years ago, pulled weather reports, even called flight service. Less then 30 min went by on departure. I had no ATIS or AWOS at my field and departed a narrow airfield and had 3400 feet of runway to deal with. I was in a Cherokee 140 rental that I had logged 50 hours in and it was a very well used airplane. This was a VFR only plane and was used in this airfields training school. I climbed to pattern altitude and was about to make my crosswind turn out to the east and went right in the soup. First response was panic....quickly descended followed by hard left turn came back out of the clouds all in a panic as this was moving in quickly. I tried my best to enter a downwind, in and out of clouds, managed to get on a messy final all over the place on a tight airstrip, it was such a bad approach fast, at a cross to the runway and by the time I thought I could have touched down there was not enough runway to stop the plane. So I made the only decision I felt I could and applied full power and climbed, I kept saying over and over fall back on your 3 hours of under the hood training and if you don’t calm down and relax you are going to die..... so I relaxed and focused on the instruments no mater what my head or inner ear was going to tell me. I just followed the AI, the compass and watched my altitude. I tried to find help on the radio but found that a distraction during the climb. Finally I came out on top around 5000 feet. Took some time to thank god and then pulled out the charts and started getting organized. Contacted the closest regional airport and let them know my situation and was looking for VFR. Turns out my destination was VFR so I proceeded on course. About half way to my destination I went over the front that caused the low clouds. It looked like a wall behind me. Landed at the destination and did a lot of thinking on what went wrong and what went right. I share all this because I feel like VFR into IMC might very well happen to anyone. I can tell you for me the imc condition was not the issue. It was one issue to work out but the one that should have killed me is the panic, the flyers and training with all the warnings of flying into this condition drilled into me filled with fear it could happen, fear of hearing if it happens you die etc. The main thing I leaned from all this is weather is never as expected, all weather men should be fired for bad forecasting and panic will be your most difficult thing to overcome and distract you from flying the plane. I would love to see training switch from instilling fear which causes panic and focus on what to do if you find your self in the situation. I understand flying into imc without training can kill you, but you can still teach more under the hood training without fear. You can still try to deal with the bad decision making without fear within the training sessions. For me the logical steps if this is the number one killer for VFR pilots training would cover more under the hood trading and focus on some logical procedures to help calm the panic and focus on the flying. I said my peace and hope this helps someone if it ever happens to you.
After reading about all the crashes from vfr into imc, I felt I needed to share my experiences and my opinion on some of the training sessions I have watched and attended. I see a problem with some parts of the training approach used today. It seems like all training I have reviewed is about fear, things said like you will die in 90 secs etc. So on to my experience, it happened to me 20 years ago, pulled weather reports, even called flight service. Less then 30 min went by on departure. I had no ATIS or AWOS at my field and departed a narrow airfield and had 3400 feet of runway to deal with. I was in a Cherokee 140 rental that I had logged 50 hours in and it was a very well used airplane. This was a VFR only plane and was used in this airfields training school. I climbed to pattern altitude and was about to make my crosswind turn out to the east and went right in the soup. First response was panic....quickly descended followed by hard left turn came back out of the clouds all in a panic as this was moving in quickly. I tried my best to enter a downwind, in and out of clouds, managed to get on a messy final all over the place on a tight airstrip, it was such a bad approach fast, at a cross to the runway and by the time I thought I could have touched down there was not enough runway to stop the plane. So I made the only decision I felt I could and applied full power and climbed, I kept saying over and over fall back on your 3 hours of under the hood training and if you don’t calm down and relax you are going to die..... so I relaxed and focused on the instruments no mater what my head or inner ear was going to tell me. I just followed the AI, the compass and watched my altitude. I tried to find help on the radio but found that a distraction during the climb. Finally I came out on top around 5000 feet. Took some time to thank god and then pulled out the charts and started getting organized. Contacted the closest regional airport and let them know my situation and was looking for VFR. Turns out my destination was VFR so I proceeded on course. About half way to my destination I went over the front that caused the low clouds. It looked like a wall behind me. Landed at the destination and did a lot of thinking on what went wrong and what went right. I share all this because I feel like VFR into IMC might very well happen to anyone. I can tell you for me the imc condition was not the issue. It was one issue to work out but the one that should have killed me is the panic, the flyers and training with all the warnings of flying into this condition drilled into me filled with fear it could happen, fear of hearing if it happens you die etc. The main thing I leaned from all this is weather is never as expected, all weather men should be fired for bad forecasting and panic will be your most difficult thing to overcome and distract you from flying the plane. I would love to see training switch from instilling fear which causes panic and focus on what to do if you find your self in the situation. I understand flying into imc without training can kill you, but you can still teach more under the hood training without fear. You can still try to deal with the bad decision making without fear within the training sessions. For me the logical steps if this is the number one killer for VFR pilots training would cover more under the hood trading and focus on some logical procedures to help calm the panic and focus on the flying. I said my peace and hope this helps someone if it ever happens to you.
