Flying VFR into IMC - a top KILLER of pilots - My close call!

reviewing this footage it's hard to believe I shot this Here I am Scud running along at 1500 feet above ground in barely three mile visibility and it got worse before I got to my destination so how did it safe and conscientious pilot such as myself get into this situation bear with me as I walk you through what should have been a routine flight but ended up being the closest call that I've ever had nearly flying VFR into IMC conditions at the time of this flight I'd had over 15 years of experience flying VFR and I'd never pushed my limits near the legal weather minimums however after this flight I was inspired to take on the challenge of IFR training this close call motivated me to at least get the training for the added safety buffer so it started with a day that was reported to be good VFR with a brisk but acceptable north wind I had done my due diligence and checked the weather and the NOTAMs online and I'd even done an official weather briefing over the phone I'd be flying with a pilot buddy that I regularly fly with the plan was a bit of a mission of sorts so it added some pressure to me to schedule but we were up for it and I always loved a specific reason to go flying I'm maintaining currency on several different types of aircraft from two different local airports so it gets tricky sometimes to keep up for the first flight I was due to fly 172 from my local home base at Toronto Island a Class C control zone and my buddy was due to fly out of burlington airport a local uncontrolled airport in a piper which i also fly and i was due for my monthly flight he lives closer to burlington so i plan to fly out there and meet him with the 172 from toronto and then ride along and swap seats for a quick local flight in the piper he doesn't have as much experience in controlled airspace as i do so he opted to drive down pick me up and carpool to toronto to ride along in the 172 for the flight to Burlington where we parked 172 then we'd fly the piper for a few circuits each then returned the piper and I'd fly us back to Toronto in the 170 you still with me all this to say it was a relatively complicated plan in terms of logistics but the distance wasn't far the weather was supposed to remain good VFR so it seemed like a fun thing to do on a Sunday afternoon the flight outbound was completely routine and uneventful and I expected the same for the return trip home the only potential problem for the day was lake effect snow streamers or squalls from the north there are some big bodies of water north of Toronto and the wind was pretty strong from the north but the initial weather briefing assured me that the streamers wouldn't make it as far south as Toronto and on the outbound flight I confirmed that that seemed to be the case weather was beautiful and clear it's worth noting that lake effect snow is a very localized phenomenon and often times on lake effect days you can have beautiful flying anywhere specifically upwind of lakes but downwind of lakes you really can get some pretty nasty weather in very localized pockets upon arrival to Burlington it seemed only fair to let my buddy take the first turn in the left seat of the piper so I wrote along and enjoy the view visibility and sky conditions were still great as you can see however after the first or second circuit it occurred to me while we're on the downward leg the visibility toward Toronto had definitely dropped and the city was now fully obscured and then an aircraft arriving from the east also reported that conditions were degrading so when my buddy finished logging his time I decided to delay my flight in the piper and recheck the weather for the return flight I called the local flight service station for a briefing and found that my suspicions were correct and the north wind had picked up and there was a solid streamer making its way to Toronto after all there was a good amount of snow activity but the briefer assured me that the visit was expected to stay greater than five miles not something I'd ever really want to fly in even though it's legal and the ceiling was supposed to stay above 2000 at this point I scrubbed my flight in the piper which was okay because they actually enforced a 60-day currency in Burlington if you have more than 150 hours total time but I still like to stay with a personal minimum of a 30 day currency on each type that I fly if I can so regarding personal minimums I also have personal weather minimums for cross-country flying those are six miles visibility and 3000 foot ceilings wind gusts not above 20 knots so in this case I was already suddenly below my personal weather minimums the decision should have been a simple no go if I were at home and this was to be a local fun flight I'd not even be considering taking off in five mile visibility with 2,000 foot ceilings just not a fun kind of condition to fly in but I wasn't home and my buddy's car was stranded at the other airport this is a classic get their itis or get home itis type situation but it was so easy to try to rationalize it was only 23 miles away a 13 minute flight vist still look great here in Burlington and was forecast to stay legal in Toronto so I decided to test my personal minimums and go for it with relative confidence it really hadn't occurred to me that it could continue to get worse in the short window of the return flight but it did here are the meters and the special ease that were being issued while I was flying pause the video if you want to decode these but the bottom line is three species got issued within the space of one hour because things were changing and degrading relatively quickly and here's the radar showing what was happening a super localized lake effect snow streamer was parked right over Toronto so I blissfully took off into this relatively clear sky in Burlington but things were changing pretty fast even though I'd gotten a weather briefing just minutes before departure this nose well was definitely thickening up and moving further south and I was heading straight for it I don't usually look at the radar while I'm flying on my phone but now that we have these tools on board especially with for flight and so on you really can get some pretty amazing real-time information just even for basic VFR flying and I've got a little app that lets me see radar in real time and if I had done that I may have changed my mind enroute because I would have had more accurate real-time information and as you can see this radar now is quite different than it was in the morning so I still had the picture in my head of the snow squalls being way up further north I just really couldn't have imagined that they were going to be that thick that far south toward Toronto this flight took place early on in my GoPro flying I didn't have the intercom audio sorted out at that point and I also mismanaged the batteries trying to shoot the flights in both the 172 and the piper but honestly I was mostly concerned with getting footage for my buddy in the piper I wasn't as concerned about shooting my totally routine flight in the 172 so this is also a great lesson just to remind yourself that no flight is routine you should always expect the unexpected and that lesson is not lost on me here but anyway unfortunately my view cam actually died on the way home so I didn't get footage of the last bit of this flight where it really started to get scary I still have a bit of the view from the other camera which I was using to shoot the instruments but I sure wish I had the other angle to review just how bad the visibility got but I have enough information and the landmarks were really clear and what I did get so I was able to put together a pretty cool animation to trace the last bit of the flight we had flight following for the bulk of this flight and visibility was initially acceptable but the snow intensity was increasing and the ceiling ended up dropping down to about 1700 feet my plan was to fly home at 2000 as we were handed off to the Toronto Island Tower conditions degraded relatively quickly I contacted the tower before getting ADIS as I was starting to get distracted that my 2,000 feet was no longer working at this point we were about 10 miles away so I descended the 1500 feet and the visibility seemed to stay the same or get slightly worse at about 2 miles I asked the tower for an update on visibility and he said they were reporting 3 miles I made it clear that I didn't think I had that kind of visibility at 1,500 feet of course this is when the view cam battery died but using these landmarks here the breakwater and that marina further up ahead I was able to analyze and post here that my estimate of less than 3 mile visit and it did continue to drop as we got closer they used the audio that I pulled off live ATC net sorry about the quality I said I've got update on your visibility I'm at 1,500 feet now let's look at the two miles here their defense I love that last bit how I'm kind of trailing off when I'm talking about descending to 15 when I'm already at 15 that's clearly a VFR guy that's bit off more than he can chew because I knew I couldn't go any lower I seriously considered doing a 180 when we were about 6 miles away when the visitor opted to what I estimated was less than 2 miles under a murky undefined ceiling of 1,500 feet at this point I was almost over my neighborhood so the landmarks were very familiar and it was of great help that I knew the shoreline would take me straight to the airport and that gave me a sense of security but that's not really something you can take to the bank when you're risking flying VFR into IMC now to be clear as far as where my head was that in terms of risk assessment part of my decision to press on was that I knew I had clear air not far behind me and I was confident that if I hit a wall of snow and suddenly found myself in total IMC conditions I could transition to instruments execute the emergency 180 turn while informing ATC and I'd make it back into clear air within relatively short order but I can't deny the fact that get their ideas or get home itis was also a significant part of the decision to press on my buddy was looking at nothing but white to his right and up front so I know he was a little more nervous than I was so there were definitely a few adrenaline-filled moments while we wait our options and a good note to bring up at this point is that when you do fly with a pilot buddy you've got to make sure you have a good relationship and a good dynamic and that you don't find yourself in a situation where you end up both being passengers my buddy took that opportunity at that point to remind me that he was deferring to me as pic2 make that 180 decision because I do have a little bit more experience than he does and I was PSE but I was close to making that 180 I kept track of the shoreline but didn't see any part of the airport until less than two miles away and just as I was almost losing hope the airport came into view and even then I only saw a part of runway 0-8 it was pretty weird not to be able to see the whole field so it is actually pretty cool to analyze in contacts like this looking down at it with a graphic and in terms of the chart we've got less than two miles vis this is how much of the chart you're seeing endo so if you can imagine being somewhere where landmarks weren't obvious I mean forget it dead reckoning is just not possible so yeah visibility was so poor that I couldn't even see the other end of a 4,000 foot runway when I was a mile or two away it would have been nice to be able land straight in on that eastbound runway that I was looking at but I knew the wind was really strong from the north and the tower confirmed that reporting 320 at 18 gusting 25 which is much higher than was forecast which explains why the snow had come this far south so landing with that kind of a crosswind was not going to be an option on 0 8 so I was cleared to the downwind for runway 3 3 it was pretty creepy to make that turn and face out toward the water looking at nothing but white out the front window and I flew one heck of a tight circuit keeping that Airport in sight at my left window and my turn finally dumped full flaps and flew one heck of a steep approach just to get her down this view here you can see a little tiny bit of the runway there once I get on the final so it wasn't until I was on short file that I could see the buildings starting to come through the snow just north of the airport there so the snow was actually continuing to thicken up as I was flying and I had no intentions of missing this landing despite the 15 gusting 25 it was actually one of the better landings I've done in a while so I'd be lying if I didn't admit that as I was taxing back I realized that my feet were shaking on the rudder pedals a little bit I was definitely happy to be on the ground after this one once the engine sound was a bit quieter you can kind of hear some of our conversation about it I'll let that play at the end here after my disclaimer after getting the plane parked I called the flight service station to file the following PI rep they were pretty happy to receive it because it was becoming clear that things were changing fast and the actual weather was not being reflected in the reports so if you made it to the end I really appreciate you watching this was actually probably the hardest video that I've had to make it was the most work I've put into editing one of these things and I also sat on this footage for almost a year just trying to figure out how and if I even wanted to share this but I think at the end of the day this is the kind of thing that is worth sharing ironically it was actually a confidence builder for me to get through it but it definitely inspired me to get into IFR training I still intend to fly for fun and mostly in fair weather I don't intend to fly an actual imc much once I do get my instrument rating if I manage to pull it off it seems like an insurmountable task still even though I'm getting through the training but whether you want to fly for fun or whether you've been flying for a long time I'd recommend that you get up there with an instructor and do some actual IMC flying do some additional instrument training even if you have no intentions of getting your instrument rating just get yourself some instrument experience and build some confidence so you know you can handle it if it happens so anyway I'm just a private pilot been flying for a long time but I don't fly tons so every flight I try to get as much as I can out of it make these videos for my own self analysis purposes and I'm happy to share for more virtual ride-alongs flying videos like this please subscribe and keep on can your flight chop-chop guys that was awesome all right that was good played today like we all got something out of it not work out Ciara up at Bravo three three that's exactly that different wasn't any clothes stranded in cars somebody from their car I was on the level with him saying I ain't got three miles dude yeah I I was pretty I was having a hard time transitioning typically in stories because I lose my awareness but I was trying to both I don't know what I needed to know the airport's right they're not going to lose my attitude airports right there but I mean the reality is I had no variety all I could see was Airport right over on like that way that way no run yeah that was in cool all right captain I was right where you were though like moles like seconds away from 180 seconds away awesome

Channel: FlightChops

Views: 1,678,504

Rating: 4.8820992 out of 5

Keywords: Airport, Airplane, Aviation (Industry), piper, cessna, 172, pa28, Plane, gopro, Fixed-wing Aircraft (Invention), flight training, flying, VFR, Flight Following, ATC, Visual Flight Rules, teaching, accident, check list, safety, danger, navigation, IMC, IFR, instrument, get-home-itis, get-there-itis, pilot

Id: B56DoPDd6BM

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 28 2014