"houstondan" wrote in message
oups.com...
rather than hijack a perfectly good arcane science thread; i'll start a
new one 'cause the core question is a darn good one.

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.

gps(not waas) says nearest airport of any kind is 30 minutes away and
gas-totalizer says the fan stops in 10 minutes.

not mountainous but you ain't in kansas either todo...whatcha gunna
do??
dan
The engineers answer - it depends.answer below assumes I am using my little
hand held gps with not altitude info.
First I would look at my altimeter
If the gps tells me where i am , I would look at the chart I am carrying and
find out what the terrain is like and minimum safe altitude. I would
descend to that altitude and hope to get out of the soup. at the same time
I would be heading in the direction of the best possible landing area (
using rate 1 turn if required). I would also be flying at the precautionary
speed wtih 20 degrees of flaps ( in my warrior).
If I had ample fuel my answer would be very different. I would most
probably try to climb above it and look for a hole. I would also be using
whatever assistance I could get on the radio from ATC , other aircraft etc
to establish what the cloud situation is. But with limited fuel , I just
want to get down with some power to play with.
terry