Waypoints

It's Monday, July 29, and your instrument proficiency runs out at midnight on Wednesday, July 31. You've flown more than six hours in instrument conditions over the past six months, but you've done only five approaches. You're scheduled to make a long cross-country flight tomorrow and return on Wednesday evening.

The weather forecast calls for excellent conditions along the route tomorrow. However, thunderstorms and rainshowers are forecast all along the route on Wednesday, meaning an IMC flight back if you can even get home as scheduled. Your return may be delayed until Thursday, August 1, after your instrument currency has expired. What do you do?

Do you make the trip and hope that the weather is good enough to return on Wednesday? But if it isn't, you're stuck until VFR conditions prevail — no more filing of instrument flight plans until you meet the 6-6-6 rule or get an instrument competency check. Or do you go for it, risking a return flight on Thursday morning — possibly in IMC — knowing full well that your instrument capabilities didn't evaporate at midnight on Wednesday? Who will know the difference?

Do you take out your logbook and Parker pen and grant yourself a P-51 ILS approach, making moot the whole line of thought? Only your conscience will know.

The dark side

You and a colleague are on a business trip in the Midwest. Your morning meeting stretched into the afternoon. By the time you get to the airport for departure, it's midafternoon. You won't be home on the East Coast until after dark. Your night landing currency expired two weeks ago. It wouldn't be an issue if you were alone, but you've got a passenger. Suddenly you need to have logged three takeoffs and landings at night within the last 90 days.

Do you go for it, knowing that you've made lots of safe night landings? You're no less capable of landing at night than you were two weeks ago. P-51 time again?

The reality

A couple of long cross-country flights gave me some time to consider such ethical questions.

The first flight seemed simple enough. Editor-at-Large Tom Horne needed a ride to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Memorial Day. The entire Northeast had been socked in with rainshowers and fog for two days, so I was glad to get out of the house for a little instrument flying. It was an ideal day for logging instrument time — no thunderstorms or ice around, just some juicy stratus clouds and fog.

The one-hour trip from Frederick, Maryland, went, quite literally, smoothly as we zipped in and out of the clouds and rain showers. A check with flight service indicated pretty much the same conditions for the return flight, but with a patch of Level 3 showers moving toward Frederick from the west.

A Hawker jet entered the hold for the ILS 23 approach at Frederick as I joined the localizer. "Cancel IFR as soon as you break out," the jet pilot urged over the unicom, believing — as I did — the AWOS reports of 800 and two and a half. But I knew that the AWOS was wrong when just two miles out I could briefly see the ground through a hole in the clouds. The cloud bases were dragging the treetops.

Down, down the glideslope I went, ready to fly the missed approach procedure. Finally, at about 400 feet agl and three-quarters of a mile, with rain pounding the windshield, I spotted the approach lights and splashed uneventfully through the puddles on the runway. The jet sneaked in a few minutes later. So much for electronic weather observations.

If my instrument currency had expired the day before, would I have been less capable of the approach?

Three days later, Denis Beran, AOPA's vice president of advertising, and I headed west to a meeting in Kansas City. Imagine an 800-nautical-mile trip with clear skies all the way — and westbound without a headwind. Sometimes life is good.

A line of thunderstorms 75 miles wide right over the Kansas City area complicated our return the next afternoon. Every 20 minutes a cell would pass over the airport, bringing thunder, lightning, and heavy rain. Finally, things brightened to the west as the weather radar in the FBO showed Kansas City on the west side of the east-moving line. A flight service briefer suggested a route west to Topeka and then northeast to Des Moines would put us north of the line. From there we could go east without fear of the thunderstorms. East of the line, the weather was as clear as that which we had experienced the day before.

As we climbed into the airplane three hours after our planned departure, it occurred to me that our landing in Frederick, after a fuel stop, would be at about midnight. "You night current?" I asked Denis.

"But of course," he assured.

The circuitous routing gave us an extra 90 minutes to debate the ethics of flying outside the FAA's regulatory minimums.

At the fuel stop in Peoria, Illinois, we traded places, giving him the left seat for the night leg — a nonevent under a bright full moon.

Somewhere over a moonlit Columbus, Ohio, we concluded that while it would be foolish to stretch the FAA regulations for fear of reprisal by the feds, we both feared more the insurance implications if an accident were to occur when the pilot had exceeded the limits — proving once again that you can't regulate or legislate stupidity, but you can insure against it.