What a dummy..

[stmymdy]

i wonder how many of those of you
that said "ohhh it didnt sound so bad" and "just dodge the cbs blah blah"
fly ifr?

[RatherBeFlying]

I've done quite a bit of white water canoeing. Some rapids are more challenging than others. You start with the easy ones and as your skill and [over]confidence increase you take on harder ones. Sometimes you fall out of the boat and get royally thumped. You may discover that a lifejacket does not always keep your head above water. Plus the water can be really cold. But with a lifejacket (well PFD) and wetsuit and fellow paddlers at hand to fish out swimmers it's pretty hard to get yourself killed as long as you give nasty waterfalls a wide berth.

Like running rapids .. running has its challenges and is successful most of the time, except when you hit a rock -- you're dead.

[hairdo]

Like running rapids .. running has its challenges and is successful most of the time, except when you hit a rock -- you're dead.

Right. And like most people here, I like flying, not getting killed while flying. So no .. running for me. If it ain't VFR, go IFR. If it ain't even IFR, go home and enjoy a day off.

[fish4life]

When the weather's good go VFR

When the weather's bad go IFR

When the weather's very bad go VFR

Lurch

+1

most approaches will get you down to 5-800' agl while you can .. run VFR at 300' agl with the proper ops spec... sad but true that really poor weather means vrf .. running is your only chance some days

[aviator2010]

unless anyone was in the cockpit why the f#$# r they comenting?

[Meatservo]

I've noticed that my personal limitations can vary somewhat. I've been in the situation you describe, the weather being such that I would not want to fly, and disapproving when I see someone else doing it. Then other times, flying in weather that seems quite innocuous and learning later that someone thought I was nuts. When I used to fly VFR on floats on the West Coast I couldn't believe the weather some guys were willing to fly in. Other times I myself have flown VFR on days when the IFR planes were grounded. When I flew a twin Otter I would very frequently fly VFR in terrible weather, and feel very safe knowing that I could always go up into the clouds if I didn't like how things were looking close to the ground. Realistically it comes down to how well-equipped your plane is, how experienced you are, and what part of the country you are in. There are plenty of perfectly legal things that are way more risky than other illegal things. For example, it's legal to fly a piston Beaver with an altimeter, compass and a clock, in one mile visibility in uncontrolled airspace. It's totally illegal in your IFR equipped twin Otter to fly above the clouds to your destination, use your radar altimeter to punch down to 1000' over flat terrain, pop out of the clouds and land. I can tell you which I would rather do. Sometimes as a low-time pilot I would be pretty critical of the higher-time guys who were doing things I myself would be scared to do, only to find that years later I was doing the same things myself without a second thought. Maybe the guy you saw was actually doing something unsafe, but given your present experience level I wonder if in a few years you won't be so outraged when you see the same thing happening. The best thing is if it's someone you know you can sometimes learn quite a bit if you find a diplomatic way of approaching the other pilot and asking him what he was doing and how come he felt comfortable handling the situation the way he did. If you can successfully come across as not being preachy or disapproving he might just tell you about it and you can decide then if it makes sense to you or still just seems dangerous.

[Liquid Charlie]

It's pretty hard to judge what's going on when you are not sitting in the seat -- I'll say one thing a guy only is a dummy if that's business as usual. Think there are just to things that are inevitable - those who have found themselves in a situation that is the last place they want to be and those who it will happen to. You learn from your experiences and hopefully a wiser person for it -- the dummy comes in if you don't.

[aviator2010]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-qPtWc4heA&feature=fvw

[AuxBatOn]

and ya, i don't fly a navajo or a 1900 or whatnot..but are you telling me that because of this, i am less qualified to make the call when it would be safe to fly?

Yes.

[Lurch]

and ya, i don't fly a navajo or a 1900 or whatnot..but are you telling me that because of this, i am less qualified to make the call when it would be safe to fly?

Yes.

I have to agree

What you see on the ground doesn't mean that much. Unless somebody here was actually in the cockpit I think we need to put the pitch forks and torches away.

Lurch

[Meatservo]

We're all in this together. Except people of the ground. They aren't.