a good number of fatal AK crashes (and, i imagine, everywhere else crashes too) are vfr into imc.

here's the scenario:

i make a mistake and take off into questionable weather. i don't turn around (mistake #2) until i'm out in the boondocks, over tundra with hills/mountains around me, and the wx is coming down. fast.*

anyways, i'm two really big mistakes in, and now i have three options:

1. continue doing what i'm doing. try to stay below it.
pros: eeehhhh...not many
cons: lots

2. pick the best looking piece of tundra and do an emergency landing. i'm in a 152, so i have something like a 99% chance of flipping the plane, but if i do the short field landing i've practiced, maybe i can slow it down to a survivable airspeed. little question on this one: if i DID do this...cut the engine, turn off masters and fuel, and reduce fire chances...or come in with some power for a nose-high 'dragged in' landing, which would be slower?
pros: i've practice short field landings.
cons: wreck the plane. crash landing. ugly. possible fire. bumps, bruises, broken bones. hopefully the shoulder harness would save my head.

3. punch up into the clouds, circle (hopefully away from the hills) to what i believe is a safe altitude, fly back to my home airport and attempt an approach.
pros: land safely at home. woohoo!
cons: i have no actual cloud experience yet. i haven't yet practiced the approaches at my home airport. that's a lot of new stuff to be doing in an emergency situation...

disclaimer notes:
-i have absolutely no intention of ever making the mistakes that would get me into this. i'm a chickenshit coward when it comes to wx, and i plan to cautiously continue being that way. but i bet that a lot of dead pilots also never intended to make those mistakes, either. maybe it's a bad idea to play out worst-case mistake scenarios...but i feel like a grow a little bit by thinking about how i'd handle them.
-i'm fully aware that #3 is very, very very illegal and impossible to officially recommend. (well...maybe. i'm not familiar with the intricacies of a 'pop up' clearance...any of you sages care to expound on this?)
-i know this isn't nearly as fun as most other things to talk about, but i feel like it's a good one to hash out.
-i imagine that the type of wx could have a huge impact on the decision. if it's a thin layer of marine fog, then yeah, pop through it and be on my way...at least, i think. am i wrong about that? summer time low stratus? hmm. wintertime snow flurries? fall rain/mist? i'm not sure how those would affect it.

my current answer: set down in the tundra. simple reason: i've practiced short field landings, and i have the impression that a slow & controlled landing-flip is very survivable.

whaddya say?

*i haven't been flying long enough to lose a friend to this, but from what i hear, it is a question of when, not if. sad and terrifying to think about

PS
thanks in advance

I would consider calling a friend!! The local FSS may very well be able to direct you to better weather, a runway, or at least tell you how thick the cloud cover is and what your chances of picking up ice are. Once on top they can get you to the best place to come down. If you do go down they will hopefully have a good fix on your location and can send help. Weather coming down is usually flyable if you pull flaps and slow way down. It is fog coming up that causes the problem. If you can't reach FSS or other help than you have to make the call and there is not enough info given to help you with that. If you do try to land fly off as much fuel as you can and make sure there is nothing loose behind your seat because it will hit your head. Some 6-8 ft tall willows may not be a bad place to land. Push 911 on the spot before you land, open door, go buy a helmet tomorrow so you don't have to worry about you head!!
DENNY

dpadvo wrote:-i have absolutely no intention of ever making the mistakes that would get me into this. i'm a chickenshit coward when it comes to wx, and i plan to cautiously continue being that way. but i bet that a lot of dead pilots also never intended to make those mistakes, either.

Very true, it's not like you get in an aircraft and think maybe Ill get home alive if the weather is kind to me........Unfortunately the psyche involved to put a perfectly good flying aircraft down and wreck it to escape what is essentially a pilots bad judgement to get in that predicament in the first place must be very hard to overcome. I salute anyone who has had to make that call and sacrifice an aircraft in order to walk away regardless of how they came to run out of options.

What's that saying about crash investigations being carried out on a clear blue sky day.......the day after the accident.

No IMC proficiency?

Rating means nothing if not proficient. If that's the case you only have two options. 1 and 2.

1) Continue scud running towards a suitable place to land, staying close as possible to the ground, and as far from the cloud bases as possible. Slow down a lot. You'll be in a very tiny circle of visibility, the slower you go, the bigger it appears.

And when ground contact gets iffy, go to option.....

2) Make as slow and soft and short a landing as possible regardless of what the ground looks like. You can slow most stock spam cans down to 40 MPH (or less) using power and ground effect. You'll survive a landing like that.

Option 3 means you'll be dead in a minute or two. As a pretty firm rule, pilots who can't fly on the gauges die trying to fly on the gauges. Especially when forced into it in panic mode.

Gump


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The fact that you are thoughtful about this situation is good assurance you won't ever do it, deliberatly, but as you know stuff happens.

Climbing may also put you in icing conditions in Alaska, another potential issue with that strategy.

The nosewheel on a 152, if held off as long as possible with full aft elevator won't touch down until about 25 MPH I bet. You can experement on runways and look at GS on the GPS if you like. Then I bet you's scrub more speed as it dug into the tundra and if you did flip, I bet you'd be going no more than 10 MPH so you'd be fine 99 times out of 100. Don't use brakes on rollout.

As far as stopping the prop, I'd say don't distract yourself. It's not your airplane anyways, but your insurance company's.

The questions that one should be asking his or her self should be more along the lines of "how can I be certain to avoid this situation?" rather than "how should I react once I am in this situation?".

dpadvo wrote:punch up into the clouds, circle (hopefully away from the hills) to what i believe is a safe altitude, fly back to my home airport and attempt an approach.

It is a good idea to define personal limits and rules to fly by. "Hoping" not to crash in to terrain and "attempting" an approach in IMC exposes you to levels of uncertainty that should be identified as completely unacceptable in aeronautical decision making. This is how practically all VFR in to IMC accidents occur.

Put a high priority on learning to obtain a thorough and comprehensive weather briefing. The information available to us today is incredibly accurate and reliable in Alaska, Canada and the lower 48. The network of webcams around commonly traveled routes in Alaska make the go/no-go decision far more informed than in years past. With the information available these days, the situation that you have identified is totally avoidable.

If the conditions that you choose to fly in make inadvertent encounters with IMC a real possibility, make it your first priority to learn the fundamentals of attitude instrument flying and develop proficiency with these methods for controlling the airplane. The instruments are the only resources that you have for controlling the airplane when you are in the clouds and you must rely on them. You can count on the fact that your kinesthetic senses WILL deceive you.

If you have radio and radar contact with ATC, they will help you to navigate, so go ahead and suck it up and engage this indispensable resource as soon as possible. You and ATC are infinitely better equipped for arriving at a safe conclusion that you alone are.

A forced landing due to weather would result from a series of big mistakes that are perfectly avoidable. Ask yourself how badly you need to be where you want to go. Always know the the conditions and forecast for your entire ETE/ETA at your departure, along the route and at your destination. If there's a good chance that you may not get there, remember: it's much better to be on the ground wishing that you were in the air than to be in the air wishing that you were on the ground.

My best advice is to seek instrument flight training and learn to use all of the tools available to you. It's a good idea to remain extremely afraid of the potential scenario that you have identified.

Try to scud run to the nearest safe spot to set her down, would be my answer to a VMC pilot.

Best answer would be to get your IFR and become fluent in IMC.

Exactly.

Especially with you up there in Nome. Even with the village AWOS's and cameras now, there is still a huge amount of territory up there with no weather reporting, and completely separate weather systems. The trap is always wx in the middle. Might be OK where you start, and OK where you want to be, but you're guessing the middle. And Murphy's Law says it shuts down around you at the worse possible point.

Then what? Push forward into the unknown, or turn around into the now unknown also. And Nome wx sucks big time really fast. Those hills turn invisible in microseconds in whiteout conditions, and you've got tons of IFR traffic in/out which means holding out of the zone for loooong periods of time waiting for a special.

You really need to add on an instrument rating. Not so much for working in the system, but for becoming proficient at attitude instrument flying. Like MTV calls it, "pretend VFR" is a fact of life in the Arctic. You CAN NOT fly VFR when it gets mucky up there. You WILL whack the ground in a CFIT if you try.

The absolutely, positively only way to avoid wx traps up there is to not fly at all. But, that's not what your airplane is for. And conversely, if you fly up there, sooner or later you WILL get caught in shitty weather.

Guaranteed.

Arctic Alaska is a very big, harsh, unforgiving place to fly airplanes.

Get rated, equip your airplane with a good attitude indicator and basic GPS, stay proficient at partial panel, and go have fun pushing your limits a bit. You'll be amazed at how comfortable you can get in conditions that in a past life you'd be certain were going to kill you dead in a heartbeat.

Gump

I won't act like I know what's right, or even what I would do in the situation, but for my IFR training, my instructor made me close my eyes then said "turn left to south and level off" as I was flying straight and level, and well trimmed, to the west.

About the time I thought I had rolled out to the south, he said "alright, recover" and as I looked up I was going through 75 degrees of bank and descending pretty rapidly.

Given, I had my eyes closed, but it really made me aware of the false vestibular cues that my books had always warned about but I had never experienced like that. I've yet to fly in actual IMC and I'm not eager to.

I agree with Gump and 93Kilo. It is not safe to mix low VFR and I FR, at least down here where lots of things stick up. You can see much better down low and you didn't need to enter wx without recent experience and a plan. I'm a CFII. In 10,000 hours on pipeline patrol, I never popped up into the clouds.

I have had plenty of engines quit, but was never dumb enough to turn the thing off. Make a precautionary early in a place you might get out of.

DPadvo

Someday I will try to write my formula for Scud Running which can be quite different than: Continued flight into I
MC conditions. In the meantime I will just give you a link to an article about when a Successful Outcome is in doubt or problematical Problematical is my addition. A bit more by the book than I learned.


https://www.premierflightct.com/newslet ... comes.html

Chris C

wannabe wrote:
https://www.premierflightct.com/newslet ... comes.html

fixed link you cut off the "h" off the front

Thanks DOC - vision is gettin' fuzzy. Chris C

I experienced the death spiral, deliberately, in a full motion simulator. The disconnect between my butt and my eyes was amazing. I can't imagine being suddenly faced with trying to sort out which was telling me the truth while having my life depend on making the right choice within a few seconds. I am IFR rated, not current and that simulator experience left such a deep impression on me that I would give away my beloved Skywagon and walk home before I would try and take my chances with inadvertent IFR. Better to go back to being plane-less than be dead (even if not by much).
My humble opinion is that you should press the "I believe" button on this one. Take it to heart. We are inundated with information on conditions and the weather and there are not a lot of excuses. When your preflight doesn't give you favorable outcomes, find some other flier or another gullible buddy, grab a beer and go tell some good aviation lies. When the hangover passes, the airplane will still be yours, you will be alive and the skies will be blue.
I believe.

While reporting in some areas may be "incredibly accurate and reliable" the weather in AK can change very very quickly, which is the crux of the OP's question. Obviously if the weather is bad he will sit it out, the question becomes when you are in flight and the WX goes belly up...fast. We have a lot of micro-climates that can very different, just in the bay around Homer, there are three very distinct ones, it can be blue bird in Homer and only fifteen minutes away be blowing and crap visibility....with no WX reporting.

I will say this, always listen to your gut, every time I didn't listen to the little voice, I ended up with adrenaline....I don't want adrenaline when I am flying. Always think of your "outs" where are you going to go if things go poorly weather or engine wise, and use those "outs" earlier than you need to.

The statistics for CFIT in the lower 48 are 90% happen in Take off or Landing phase, for Alaska 90% happen in cruise, that is a very telling statistic of the type of conditions and geography that we are flying in.

Cancel, turn around, land, divert, call for help....stay alive.

DENNY wrote:I go buy a helmet tomorrow so you don't have to worry about you head!!
DENNY

What kind of helmet would you suggest?

I'd like to find a comfortable one for under $600-$700 with a boom mike and reasonably good earphones.

Suggestions for a dealer or two (web address and/or phone number) would be very much appreciated.

PapernScissors wrote:

DENNY wrote:I go buy a helmet tomorrow so you don't have to worry about you head!!
DENNY

What kind of helmet would you suggest?

I'd like to find a comfortable one for under $600-$700 with a boom mike and reasonably good earphones.

Suggestions for a dealer or two (web address and/or phone number) would be very much appreciated.

Search the archives as helmet options have been covered in detail in a number of threads. Not sure your budgeted price will work, but there are some pretty clever folks on here that have posted some inexpensive helmet solutions you might like. Based on those threads I have ordered and am waiting on a Gallet with all the bells and whistles, but it was more than $700

-M3X

I have a David Clark one that fits both David Clark and Bose headsets. I also have a military helo one with ear cups cut out and fits my David Clark headset. Both well within price range
DENNY

I can attest to both Army SPH-4 and David Clark doing well in crashes.

I can't add much to what others have said, but this story, which I probably told in BCP already.

My student was a good student, and very good under the hood. But he was arrogant, a know-it-all whose judgment was always suspect. He'd commented that he didn't know what all the fuss was about instrument flight, and so far, I couldn't shake him.

But on his long cross country dual, he wanted to go to Jackson, WY, he was paying the bill, and I like Jackson, so he, his wife, and I took off for Jackson. But the weather northwest of Riverton wasn't going to allow it, so after I told him that we couldn't possibly make it to the 14,000' MEA in a 172 with 3 aboard, we diverted to Casper.

At Casper, I filed for Laramie, anticipating that the weather that kept us from going to Jackson was likely moving into our path to Laramie, and I was right.

Soon after crossing over Casper Mountain, we were in and out of clouds, and he was doing pretty OK. But then we were in solid, and things started being not OK. The airplane went into a left bank and started losing altitude. I tapped the AI, and he righted it and got back on course and altitude.

A few minutes later, the same thing happened, only a little worse. Again he corrected it when I tapped the AI.

I called Center and asked for a block altitude, telling ATC that we'd likely be zig zagging and going up and down, as this was a training flight. My student couldn't hear that conversation, because we had no headsets or intercom.

Next time the bank started, I let it go. Soon we were in a gradually steepening bank and diving off course. We had turned past 90 degrees and lost a few hundred feet, before I got his attention. This time after he got us on course, he asked why this was happening. I told him it was because he was looking out the windows instead of at the gauges, and he needed to concentrate on them.

For the next very few minutes, he kept us on course and altitude. But in the coolth of the cabin, he was sweating profusely. Finally he asked if I could take over--he couldn't handle it any longer.

So I flew us until we were out of the clouds, perhaps another half hour, and once we could see, then I had him take over and fly us on to Laramie.

There was little doubt in his mind that if I hadn't been there, he and his wife would have been dead.

You should watch the video, https://youtu.be/b7t4IR-3mSo, 178 Seconds To Live. There are other versions, and some dispute the accuracy of the 178 seconds figure, but it's very realistic. Here's the bottom line: VFR PILOTS FLYING INTO IMC HAVE VERY LITTLE CHANCE OF LIVING THROUGH THE EXPERIENCE. Don't ever think that you're the exception.

Cary