Jay Honeck wrote:
Note the first paragraph. The rules are to protect the IFR folks. The
rules as I see it are not stupid.


Sorry, but I disagree. Any rule that forces me to evade or avoid
basketball-sized clouds with the same urgency as 70-story CBs is stupid.


I stand to be corrected, but if I remember correctly, you stated in your
ORIGINAL post you were at 4000 feet circling the cloud, which is an IFR
cruise altitude.


No, the puffies were forming at "around 4000 feet." I don't remember the
precise altitude, but it was some odd height, like 3700 feet.

Regardless, we were over rural Iowa. Would I have been playing around the
puffies in Chicago airspace? Of course not. But I was in some of the most
unpopulated airspace in the country.


Why would you want to chance an IFR flight popping out of that yugo size
cloud?


I don't think it's possible to compute the odds of a mid-air collision in
this area, let alone one caused by an IFR plane popping out of Yugo-sized
cloud 300 feet below his assigned altitude. In fact, I would guess that
the odds of being hit by an asteroid in flight are about the same.


Not sure if you monitor the rec.student newsgroup, but I posted my IFR
experiences today, and there was a VFR pilot in conditions that at best
were marginal for VFR flying.


I pop in over there very occasionally. I'll have to check out your thread.

Thanks for your input. I understand your points, but it's the degree and
severity of your reading of the "clear of clouds" rule with which I
disagree.
Jay;
You seem to be varying the clouds quite a bit. If I recall from your
first post on the subject you said the clouds were the size of a
Semi-truck. Now your arguing about avoiding clouds the size of a
basketball or a Yugo. First rule of digging yourself out of a hole is
to stop digging. There is also a question of if clouds the size of
basketballs even exist. If I recall my weather training correctly
clouds are formed by tempature variations in the air mass that cool the
air to the point where condensation occurs. The temp variations would
not be localized to the point of a foot but be much large then that.
While at some point in the cooling process it would be possible to see a
cloud the size of a basketball, I would not think it would be likely as
the mass of air that has the right tempature would be much larger.

John