Recently, Hilton posted:

Neil Gould wrote:
Recently, Hilton posted:

Having said all that, yes, the decision to go was extremely bad -
that's why I called this thread 'Angry'. But once the pilot was in
IMC, why could he not do a 180 after he had just very recently
finished the training and checkride to do just that?

As I read it, part of the problem was that he was lost, as it
sounded like he was in IMC soon after he was up. So, the likely
outcome is that he would have crashed elsewhere.

He took off, turned east, flew a few minutes, and entered IMC. Kinda
obvious the airport was west. Sure he asked ATC to get back to the
airport, but he wasn't lost in the sense that he didn't know his
(approximate) position.

What lead me to this conclusion is that he only flew "... a few
minutes...", which isn't very far in a 172, before calling ATC. He should
have still been in visual range of the airport. Therefore, I suspect that
the much of the area (if not all of it) was IMC, and he chose to take off
in it anyway.

Neil