tony...good thoughts. seems wise to give center or approach or whoever
might have you on radar a chance to send you away from the worst of the
bad things "as they know them". the way it's going, that person in
center might be in bangladesh and doing credit verification between
calls.

but i digress...

my 396 has terrain awareness and it did warn me off a tower i had not
shown proper respect so it's certainly not a useless feature.

about sneaky fog and trapped on top; y'all know good and well that it
happens all the time that perfectly good pilots happily boogieing on at
mach 2 listening to the tunes, enter the accident chain without doing
anything real wrong. they've got an hours reserve and once they snap to
the fact that their destination is closing in they'll just divert over
yonder where it's bound to be better and then......damn.

we get sneakey fog around here. big, deep. i know a guy who lost all
the local airports coming back from galveston one evening, he did not
have enough fuel to outrun it north (and not enough motor anyway).
used the gps and the vors and iah approach and anything else he could
think of but at then end...as he was decending into the milk toward
what he hoped was a runway way below any kind of rational minimum, the
last instrument he was watching was the altimeter.

and by the way, darwin would have liked him just fine. since any
licensed pilot represents the top 3% of the population, even the
really bad ones improve the species by breeding.

although some do get kind of mean and testy when they get old and can't
breed any more.

dan







Tony wrote:
I'd declare an emergency, ask for vectors for the lowest ground around
hoping the clouds wouldn't be on the deck there. I'd also want to have
the engine running when I got close to the ground, I may need some gas
to avoid something ugly and gliding at a few knots above stall might
not let me get above or around that tree.

For sure be sure the door is open before impact. If you have your wits
about you, idle cut off and master off would be a good idea but
probably both are minor protections.

Promise yourself you'll fly the airplane into the ground, don't stall
out at 50 feet. I think the statistics are on your side, a lot people
survive general avaition crashes.

Makes me wonder, will I be clever enough to do all of that? Coming down
in the clouds is more likely to happen to someone like me, I do lots of
SEL IMC flying.

Here's an interesting exercise. Next time you're flying around VFR,
look at what you're flying over. If it's Nebraska, you'll probably come
down on a field. If you're over the Rockies, you're probably not going
to make it. In PA, if you know the characteristic direction of the
mountains, flying parallel to them would be a good idea. Those worn
down mountains were seriously feared and ate a lot of airplanes in the
40s and 50s. I seem to remember airplanes flying on airways defined by
rotating beacons in that era.





On Nov 12, 5:41 pm, "Morgans" wrote:
hypothetical situation: you're a blue sky vfr flyer and somehow you
wind up in the soup - after having gone 2 hours and 200 miles from your
take-off point , you wake up from a nice little nap and discover you're
inside the milk bottle.Head in the direction of the airport, lean as much as possible, start a best
climb speed to gain as much time in the air after the fan stops, then
communicate.

Hope that your altitude is enough to glide to the airport, glide at best glide
speed until close to the ground, then set up for stall plus 5 and wait to come
out of the clouds, or to hit the ground, which ever comes first.
--
Jim in NC