"Kobra" wrote in message
...
[...] But I understood Dave's comment. He's trying to say you're being
way too technical. It's like someone saying, "We all know the sun will
come
up tomorrow" and you arguing, "Well, technically you're incorrect. You
really can't say that with 100% accuracy. There is a mathematical
possibility that it will not."

It's not just an academic possibility. Anyone who thinks that weather, and
reports of weather, are anywhere close to being as reliable as the sun
coming up each morning is fooling themselves. You can have one airplane in
solid IMC, and another just 500' below, and one can be legally VFR while the
other is legally IFR.

In fact, for any random target on radar in controlled airspace not on an IFR
flight plan and under ATC control, the most likely explanation is that the
airplane is in VFR conditions, regardless of weather reported in the area by
other aircraft.

There are numerous other possibilities, but the bottom line is that a pilot
in solid IMC has no way of knowing what flight conditions an airplane only
hundreds or thousands of feet away is experiencing, nevermind can a report
from that pilot be useful in knowing what flight conditions another airplane
is experiencing.

People need to give up their fallacious idea that weather is uniform in time
and space. It's not. One of the reasons it's such a hard element of flying
to come to terms with is that it's highly variable. The views expressed in
this thread and others by pilots who seem to think that a single pilot
report of IMC conditions is sufficient for knowing what conditions another
pilot is flying in are just plain wrong, and not just in a "technicality"
sense.

Pete