"Judah" wrote in message
. ..
"Gary Drescher" wrote in
:

"Judah" wrote in message
. ..

Getting IMC exposure is not the problem.

Do you believe it is responsible to take a 32-hour, non-soloed
student pilot into weather that is BELOW IFR MINIMUMS?

I have a friend who's a lapsed student pilot (I don't recall if he's
soloed yet). He'd like to come along sometime when I shoot approaches
in LIFR, so he can see what it's like. (I'm not an instructor.) I
don't think it'd be irresponsible to take him along. Do you?

Will you sit right seat? Will you take off if the weather is BELOW
MINIMUMS?

No, you're right, I wouldn't take off then. I'd want to be able to approach
and land if a mechanical problem became apparent shortly after takeoff. On
the other hand, their takeoff was uneventful, so that danger didn't
materialize. When they flew the approach, in the absence of any mechanical
problem, below-minimum visibility should not have been dangerous; it should
just have prompted a missed approach. In fact, though, they crashed a mile
or two from the field--long before below-minimum visibility should have been
a factor at all. So even if taking off under those conditions was
irresponsible, that particular irresponsibility was arguably not
contributory to the accident, as things turned out.

And no, admittedly I'm not going to sit in the right seat or let my friend
fly. I have no experience giving instruction or flying from the right seat.
I don't know how if that would be particularly difficult for an experienced
instructor to do. But from the reports I've seen, we don't know if the
student was flying the approach at all; the NTSB report doesn't even say who
was sitting where. It's conceivable that for the return leg, the instructor
was sitting in the left seat and the student was just along for the ride.

--Gary