Hello friends,

Im posting a situation that I encountered yesterday morning, it was the stupidest, and most dangerous thing that has ever happened to me in about 1000 hours of flying.

I have a 73 skylane
GNS530 w/gs
KX155w/gs
STEC55X coupled to the garmin....(this will come in very handy)

I wonder where this is going, right.

I departed F34 at 7:40am yesterday for a 1 hour flight to reno, for a friends bachelor party. The weather forcast was good calling for scattered clouds at 11000 along my route. I had to adjust my flightplan accordingly because of the TFR up at the rim fire. The weather in Reno was forecast to be good all day with scattered clouds at 22000 feet.

I fire up, and soon im cruising at 10,500 with intentions to go up to 12.5 direct to KMEV then to KRNO, during my climb to 12.5 I had to move around a little to stay in VFR conditions through the scattered layer. I am soon enjoying a good view of a small buildup of weather that is certainly north of where im going to be flying. The OAT is 28 degrees, and im cruising along at 189KT groundspeed...this is when I should have turned around. The clouds to my north that I would surely miss are now right around me, below me, but not above me, broken and I can still see the ground through many holes then I realize im doing about 195kt gs and im in a 300 ft/min climb that the AP cant trim out of. Im getting sucked into a system, and its ugly at this point. Now I am starting a course reversal back to F34, and im in and out of the "tops" and every time I encounter a cloud im picking up ice.

It was during my course reversal that I ended up in solid IMC the buildup had pretty much moved in and I had nowhere to go. THIS TERRIFIES ME, i tell myself two things before i realize im probably going to die.

1) im a checkride away from my instrument, and i go inadvertent IMC on a VFR flight
2) ive been flying 10 years and have preached this would never happen to me

Then i knew it was going to end pretty quickly, guys im admitting to you that i can honestly say i felt hopeless. My plane at this point is an ice cube, and im doing 80kt descending on a heading of 200.

Then i remembered one thing FLY THE F*CKING PLANE!

I confessed to Oakland center what i had just done, and asked for vectors to a VFR airport. They ask the typical are you IFR certified which i reply "no" they then give me vectors to modesto, which is about on the 200 heading im decending on. Im glued to the panel, i know how to handle this situation (i have actual IMC time as im getting the rating) but im just terrified. I feel myself fighting my brain slightly, and make what might have been the best decision of my life. I snapped a direct to on my garmin and coupled the ap and set up a descent at 500 ft/min.

Descending through 8,000 i can clearly tell im going to break out at any minute, the ice is dissipating and i can see the ground. I end up breaking out of the clouds at about 7,000 and at that point tell the controller that i would be going direct back to F34. He hands me off to 120.95 at that point with the usual, have a nice day at the end, i then tell him between me and you sir, i cant tell you thank you enough...you helped me tremendously and what happened was very stupid on my part thank you.

I make probably my best landing ive ever made back home, taxi to the hanger (in severe clear perfect weather) shut down and just sit in the plane for about 10-15 minutes listening to the gyros wind down. When my feet hit the ground when i got out of the plane i immediately got sick.

I got in my truck, and drove the 4.5 hours up to reno for the party. When i got to Sacramento i realized i was being pulled (or blindly flying) into the updraft phase of a pretty big storm that ended up hitting lake Tahoe, Reno, Carson city and Truckee. Driving up 80 i was in 0 visibility with heavy rain and very low temps. Upon my return today on 80 there was a fresh covering of snow over the summit of donner pass.

I had plenty of time to think about the actions that led up to my situation yesterday, I have talked to many if not all of my pilot friends about it. The answer is the same, "i know how you feel" "Ive done that" "I bet you wont do that again"

When i pushed the 182 into the hanger i told myself that im hanging it up, i cant make a competent enough decision to fly a stupid single engine airplane that ive got 500 hours in, i cant do this! I realized this isn't the right way to go about it, Im reaching out to you as my fellow pilots to share with you what i consider to be quite frankly the worst thing a VFR pilot can do, i have 974 hours, im not a 92 hour pilot. I have had cylinders go bad in flight, i have had electrical failures, ive had oil leaks on the windshield. Nothing compares to what happened yesterday and of all the above was the only scenario ive been in where i could have completely prevented it.

DONT GET COMPLACENT OR FEEL LIKE IT WONT HAPPEN TO YOU

BE PROACTIVE, DONT PUT YOURSELF INTO HELLS KITCHEN WITH NO WAY OUT

The take home i want to share with you guys:

1) i had get home/get there itis : it wont happen to me, i can keep going i have 300 hp i'll get above it etc...
2) I relied to heavily on the controlling facility to give me reports of buildups along my route (when in reality i could see out of my damn windshield what was happening)
3) I panicked, i had a clear way out...if i would have turned due east over the TFR i was scott free and could have made a very easy descent back home in solid VFR I was so fixated with busting the TFR that i just yanked left and punched into an ICE BATH i could have gone right over the tfr i was at 12.5 which was the top of the TFR
4) Poor planning on my part. I did my due diligence as a pilot, i checked weather i have nexrad on my 530, i got all the metars and tafs on my IPAD. All i had to do was call my friends in reno and ask what they saw. When i got there they told me from the time they woke up at 8am it was a solid piece of crap and they couldn't believe i was going to fly in. ALL OF MY WEATHER CHECKED OUT!!! IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE VFR ALL DAY!!! (i put too much faith in the weather being accurate)

I just checked the weather on my IPAD for KRNO right before i realized it was bad news bears where i was, it was 8:28am.

When i felt like i had it under control coupled the autopilot and wasn't going to die, my ipad was still open on the passenger seat it was 8:30am

That is without comparison in my life, the time period at which i was the most scared i have ever been in any situation, and it felt like 3 hours.





Mike

Hey Mike, thanks for sharing your story. Get back on that horse and ride!!! You are an aviator, and you can expect to have a few scary moments in flight (sounds like you've had a few already). Learn from it and press on!

You did the right thing by not panicking and flying the plane.

I fly into Firebog every once in a while to visit a buddy of mine, maybe I'll run into you sometime

Aaron

Aaron,

thanks for the comment, I appreciate it! If you don't mind me asking who is it that you come out the the baugh to visit? Next time out in town we have the 2nd big hanger next to the cropdusters at the south end of the field. If you see a red ford parked outside come by and visit!

Mike

Mike,

Many thanks for posting your story, a great reminder to always "fly the plane" and drive the car when we start feeling "get home itis".

I agree with Aaron, get back in the bird and fly, you are a much safer pilot now and we need pilots like you in GA, your story and experience will help others - it certainly has reminded me of my own "personal minimums".

If you haven't already done so you might want to consider filling out a NASA report.
http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/

I hate to say it, but if you're involved in the operation of an aircraft, you're going to have the occasional bad day - we all have them. No point in stopping - we learn the best from our own experiences. You're a much safer pilot now as a result.

He'll, even the airlines have stopped trying to teach how to avoid mistakes. Now they teach how to deal with them when they inevitably occur. Threat and Error Management is the term. Just like *every* flight we make, yours had threats and errors, and you ultimately managed them. Successfully, I might add, as you're here posting.

Successful pilots can reflect on mistakes made and are more competent as a result.

Get back in the saddle, knowing you have a newer, sharper, refined set of mental tools and are safer as a result.

Chris

Hello Mike -

Thank you for your transparency, and writing your story in an effort to help others.

If you have been in aviation long enough, it is not if something like this will happen but when.

It is experiences like this that will mold you into a more disciplined and safer pilot, and while this experience could have gone south real quick, you collected yourself and utilized what you already knew.

And just maybe, God has other plans for you and was not ready to take you on that day.

Best.....................Rob

As others have said, you're a better pilot now because of this experience. We all have our bad days (I'm lucky to have survived some of mine ), and it takes a lot of guts to share your story publicly so the rest of us can be better pilots because of your experience too.

Thanks for sharing, and glad you obeyed the rule number 1 and kept flying the plane until the dust settled. No matter what decisions you made that got you in trouble, the fact that you didn't vapor lock between the ears when the chips were down is what brought you home. Learn from the other things, but also take heart in that final fact.

First off- thanks for your story and thanks for your candor!

I have read a ton of fatal accident reports and the one thing I have learned from nearly all of them is that there is usually a series or chain of wrong decisions a pilot makes prior to the fatal accident. If anywhere along that fateful journey that pilot would have made another decision he would have survived. Such is the case with your story..... as you described you had multiple opportunites to change course throughout this process and you did not- luckly you did prior things going really, really bad.

We have all made bad decisions and those who claim they have not are simply not being honest with themselves or others. I can sense by your writing that this was an important and terifying lesson for you yesterday.

You are a better and safer pilot today than you were prior. In the end you did a great job, now get back on that f&#king horse and ride

As others have said, thanks for your story.
It's a good reminder for all.
Making that go-no go decision is sometimes tough, and when your a new pilot or a seasoned pilot that is just now getting into longer X-countries, it's getting the experience that makes for the best X-country training.
Unfortunately some of us (ME) experience what you did this weekend or something similar that gives you that spine chilling, I'm gunna shat myself feeling known as [b]"better to be on the ground wishing you were up in the air, than being up in the air wishing you were on the ground"[b].
If one is successful in surviving such a situation (ME), I feel that it helps in the go-no go decision making process down the road. In addition, I think getting older is helping as well. Maybe it's the age, maybe it is seeing the people around you perish. Dunno.
Any way. Get back in and enjoy your passion. Sometimes a guy just needs a day or two off to ponder, but if you wait long enough you'll start to get the itch again.
Blue Sky's
Tom

Experience = learning without dying. You now have greater experience. Back on the horse.

RR

Been there done that, experienced.

Thanks for sharing!

Fortunately for me, there was no social media for me to share my stupid pilot tricks the day after I made them, and I've made plenty in the last 40+ years. But just like I learned from my many, many mistakes through the years, you've learned a powerful lesson from the ones you made on this flight. Sharing your mistakes with others may help them not to make the same mistakes, so I also applaud you for your candor.

One of the most important things that comes with an IR is the realization that the weather planning has to be more extensive than for VFR flights. During the transition, when we're "almost IR", there's a tendency to push our VFR limits a bit, but without the thorough planning that goes with flying IFR. Dinking with the weather is not the same as dealing with it, as you've learned.

Your experience also points out how easy it is to get into IMC inadvertently. Often, those inexperienced in dealing with IMC can't understand that the line between acceptable VMC and IMC can be fuzzy indeed.

And of course, a corollary here is that weather can overwhelm even a well-equipped airplane. A 300 horse Skylane is an awesome airplane, but not nearly enough of an airplane to tangle with building T-storms, the effects of which can stretch far beyond their apparent boundaries.

So I echo, get back in the saddle, learn from this experience, finish up your IR, but do file the NASA report. It will benefit you if something more comes of this, and you only have 10 days from the date of the incident to get it filed; you can do it online.

Cary

Good job.

VFR on top will inevitably lead to contact with IMC if exercised with enough frequency. I see pictures guys put up from their cubs or T-carts on top with no ground to be seen for miles and it scares the shit out of me. I personally prefer a foot dragging on the ground as trying to go over anything. The older I get the larger the yellow stripe gets.

Barnstormer wrote:Mike,


If you haven't already done so you might want to consider filling out a NASA report.
http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/

This should be your number 1 priority at this point. You have 10 days!!!

Glad you're safe!

I'll echo what the other guys have said - you learned a valuable lesson, everybody gets a little complacent and makes mistakes, and file that NASA report.

As we get more and more cool gadgets like fancy glass panels and iPads and things in the cockpit, we need to focus on keeping our attention outside the cockpit in VFR conditions! An easy mistake to make!

EDIT: As I reread what I wrote, I realized it might sound like I'm associating your situation with being sucked "inside" in VFR. You know your mistakes and realizing that is the hardest part of improving! My VFR conditions comment was about another potential mistake that's easy to make!

piperpainter wrote:

Barnstormer wrote:Mike,


If you haven't already done so you might want to consider filling out a NASA report.
http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/

This should be your number 1 priority at this point. You have 10 days!!!

Yes indeed. I have filled one out before after having busted airspace at a major. Bad. In those days FAA was a kinder, gentler, agency than it is today. I never heard a word about it. I did call the tower shift supervisor on the telephone after landing at the alternate and took an ass chewing. No heavies were diverted was what saved my ass he said.

Get it done, TODAY!

EB

I've got a NASA form filled out, I am curious as I have never filled one out. How much detail do these guys want, I'm an honest man and I am not trying to hide anything from anyone (obviously).

thank you guys for pushing me to get back after it!

Good Judgement comes from Experience!
And a Most of that comes from Bad Judgement!
Not sure who penned that first, But they were Spot ON!!

Be descriptive but you dont have to give exact details 13454 ft. 124kts....etc. Let them get the idea, just like you gave to us and then tell them what you could have done differently. It shouldn't be to hard. Thanks for sharing the experience. Lessons learned!

Thanks guys for all the kind words, I truly appreciate it!

I have finished and sent in my NASA form via electronic delivery. I'm in my office at the hanger looking at my 182 while I write this response actually...you guys hit the nail on the head, just looking at the damn thing is giving me a hankering to go back up today!!

Talk about vapor lock I opened the door on the plane when I got here and every single switch is still in the on position, the heater and defrost are still in the on position, a little reminder of the "little" essential things people think are so important to turn off when you land! Thank god I had the key and master off and that I don't have a generator!!

I also had some time to update my profile on this website, if you guys have some time stop by and check out some of my pictures and add me as a friend.


Thanks again for the kind words

Mike

182dude wrote:Aaron,

thanks for the comment, I appreciate it! If you don't mind me asking who is it that you come out the the baugh to visit? Next time out in town we have the 2nd big hanger next to the cropdusters at the south end of the field. If you see a red ford parked outside come by and visit!

Mike

I usually fly in and see my buddy Randy, he's a cropduster/flying buddy of mine that has a ranch south of town a bit. He use to be a crop duster but he smartened up and started farming instead

I might cruise over this week sometime, I'll look for ya!