IFR Insight: License to (live and) learn

From preflight planning to higher-than-forecast crosswinds at their destinations, freshly minted aviators are repeatedly challenged to expand their personal envelopes without undue hazard to life, limb, or landing gear. But flying in visual conditions, usually in daylight, offers some room to recover from momentary lapses. Only common sense and the self-preservation instinct prevent brand-new instrument pilots from putting themselves into genuinely unforgiving situations the day after pocketing a temporary certificate: attempting zero-zero takeoffs, approaches into below-minimum weather, or both—even in the vicinity of thunderstorms or icing.

Most pilots make the right decisions most of the time. But personal experience illustrates how readily even a mature (or at least middle-aged) pilot can be tempted into conditions that show how poorly simulated instrument conditions mimic the real thing.

Flashes of lightning on either side provided the only environmental light when I was cleared for the GPS approach to Runway 17.
I took my instrument checkride in February 2003 with all of 2.1 hours in actual IMC logged on three individual flights. During the next four months I flew seven approaches under the hood plus three in a simulator. My first solo flight in IMC was a 3.5-hour cross-country in early June from Long Island-MacArthur Airport (ISP) in New York, a busy Class C field, to Dare County Regional Airport (MQI), the nontowered airport in Manteo, North Carolina. I took off around 6 p.m.

Long Island’s ceilings were about 800 feet, letting me get settled before tracking the departure procedure. Climbing out, I noticed airspeed decaying and realized I was unconsciously trying to pull the airplane up through the clouds. I relaxed my grip on the yoke and broke out around 4,000 feet. Most of the ride down to southern Virginia was between layers, with cloud tops creating false horizons that kept me on the gauges, but tops were rising. I was back in the clouds by the time I reached Norfolk. Night was falling amid building thunderstorms.

Flashes of lightning on either side provided the only environmental light when I was cleared for the GPS approach to Runway 17. Although there wasn’t significant turbulence, I recall considering looking for a road to land on while being vectored to the initial approach fix, and then telling myself, “You can do this. You’ve been trained!” However accurate that actually was, I broke out above circling minimums and landed into the wind on Runway 23. While reasonably well-trained, I was also lucky.

What did I miss? Start with my failure to check conditions while en route, and add the desire to disprove my wife’s belief that a piston single isn’t reliable transportation. (Our definitions of reliable still differ.) But my most conspicuous failure was not recognizing that having completed the tasks required to pass a checkride didn’t insulate me from the real hazards of the wider world.