As a proudly VFR-only pilot I’ve had two unpleasant forays into cloud, both soon after my PPL, and on both occasions I was departing early to meet people, so no doubt was suffering from destinationitis. The first I had a broken vacuum pump, so just kept going straight for what seemed a very long time and popped out into glorious sunshine. The second time I did the 180 degree turn, which went well, except at one point the artificial horizon was registering 45 degrees of bank, and ATC was useless: Manston Radar told me to ‘freecall enroute’. One was converging cloud layers, the other descending cloud and rising ground. Both would have benefited from delaying takeoff as it was CAVOK when landing at destination. Lucky both times. I think having recently done some instrument flying helped, and I now have a more conservative view for VFR minima. Night VFR over water has the same effect, but Garmin’s big screens helped on this occasion.
I’ve moved this thread out of the Instructors section (where it started 5 years ago) to the Flying section, since it is now much more generally relevant.
