In article , Sam Spade
wrote:

Jose wrote:
... same reason it's legal to depart below takeoff minimums if
part 91. It's not necessarily a good idea, but shouldn't be
regulatorily mandated.



I have never figured that one out, especially when uninformed,
innocent passengers are involved.


All things carry risk. It is up to the pilot in command to decide
whether the risk is worth the benefit.

Jose

That is the cool aid that AOPA keeps selling. Unknowing passengers
deserve better.

There is a certain amount of truth to that.

When I take a pax in my car, they are in a familiar environment, with some
frame of reference to rationally evaluate my performance. They know
whether doing 90 MPH down a city street is a reasonable thing to. Likewise
they have some reasonable idea of how closely I should be trailing the guy
in front of me, or when I should be putting my headlights or windshield
wipers on, or whether skidding the tires when I stop at a red light is
normal.

When I take somebody in an airplane, they usually have no frame of
reference. If I'm punching through clouds without a clearance, they have
no way of knowing if that's a good thing or not. They wouldn't even know
if we're about to run out of gas because they probably can't even recognize
what the fuel gauge looks like. Let's say we've just taken off a buzzer
starts going of. I tell them "Oh, don't worry about that, it's nothing".
They have no way of knowing if I'm telling them the truth (we just crossed
over the middle marker for the other end of the runway) or I'm bull****ting
them (I over-rotated and we just narrowly avoided a accidental stall).