One should never cancel IFR unless absolutely forced to, because a subsequent entry into IMC, or (in much of Europe) into CAS, requires potentially a lot of radio work, which is tricky when you are moving along at 150kt or whatever.
I also don’t think that continuing IFR forces you to fly the published missed approach into a CB. Nobody would actually do that.
Cobalt wrote:
Please dom’t start another thread nit-picking somebody’s flying
Sorry about misunderstanding, this was really not my intention. The lack of any checklist was the most obvious to me in this nice video. And I wonder what was the purpose of flying such weather at all? I once flew unintentionally in such a situation, lesson learned and stay on the ground with my little plane.
boscomantico wrote:
And why this insistence on a piece of paper checklist
ask the people who did forget to extend the landing gear. I for myself know that my brain doesn`t work properly at any time. I have a fixed gear but did forget to set the right QNH, pitot heat and flaps.
One point I would like to make about the general issue of “criticism” is that if somebody puts a video on youtube they must expect people to comment on it!
I know nearly all youtube comments (the ones posted on youtube, under the video) are utterly banal crap but that doesn’t mean the same would happen here.
The rule here is basically “play the ball, not the man” and so long as we take apart the flying aspect, that is fine. The point which I and others made about it being over-dramatised might be slightly beyond that but is still a fair point because anybody who really thinks (or puts across the impression that he thinks) that he made it only because god (or whatever) was watching him should not be flying anything bigger than a kite.
As regards the wx in the video, that is completely fine with a TBM or anything else with that sort of performance and de-ice and radar… I know a guy who used a fly a 421C in this wx routinely. Also the wx was way above minima where he was landing.
ask the people who did forget to extend the landing gear. I for myself know that my brain doesn`t work properly at any time. I have a fixed gear but did forget to set the right QNH, pitot heat and flaps.
And you do use a paper checklist I assume, right? See…, it is no 100 % safeguard against omitting some important action. The argument is somewhat more complex than “use a checklist so you’ll never mess up”.
Maybe he uses some placard on the panel. Or whatever else works for him.
I thought the flying was fine and very typical for Single Pilot IFR. But I do wonder where he was going if the airport went below minimums. I am sure plenty was edited out.
The question is what would the weather really have been like if he had had to do that 290 hearing on the missed approach. While the controller says that the northwest of the field didn’t look so bad, to me (as far as canbeen seen) the nexrad image looks pretty bad all over the western side of the airport.
From his comments during taxy-in, one clearly gathers that he thought it was a bad decision to go. Kudos for still publishing it. He clearly didn’t have a proper plan B other than to hope that the weather on that 290 heading wouldn’t “too bad”. But then again, he would have been in there only a few seconds I guess before a turn to the east would have been approved.
JasonC wrote:
But I do wonder where he was going if the airport went below minimums
I think he knew very well himself that he didn’t have a good “out”, hence his fairly high stress level.
Excellent video and very impressive skills with the radar. He talks about NEXRAD delays being 4 minutes etc; my understanding is that for the downlink data we get in Europe, the delay shows when the image was published, which says little about when it was taken as it doesn’t take treatment time into account for example. I’ve certainly had occasions in the summer where I had 12k feet rapid build ups, clearly visible ahead and on the onboard radar, and that took two update cycles to appear on the downlink. So what we have in Europe is even less suited to tactical avoidance.
Like Jason, I assume a lot was left out, I would want to know what plan B was. I have a very different skill level to this pilot, I know I have to use checklists, I would be looking out to my wings for signs of ice all the time, and I certainly wouldn’t have the bandwidth to make smart comments about what I’m doing in a situation like this.
I would have been very tempted to go visual below the clouds and stay there.
