Freezing rain is not a normal or common thing. Just because you fly in
the winter and its raining does not mean you will get freezing rain.
Freezing rain is a very serious thing and I don't believe any
airliners are even certified to fly in it. Freezing rain does mean
there is warn air above though. Anytime you fly IMC in winter you need
to always have an out. If you fly IMC you WILL someday get ice. Its
just not realitic to say anything else unless you use your IFR ticket
for nothing other than bragging rights in the FBO. The FAA's approach
to teaching icing is totally unreasonable and they need to go back to
teaching how to determine where ice may be and how to escape. This
modern idea of "if ice touches you, you will die right away" is not
helpful. Different types of situations give different types of ice.
Knowing how to determine what type if ice may be where and having outs
is really the only thing you can do. Today, there is no real way to
forcast ice (airmets are really useless and have next to no indication
of ice or lack of it).

-Robert, CFI (and frequent IFR pilot).



"Marco Rispoli" wrote in message .net...
You are flying IFR ... and you fly into a cloud. You are deep in
winter and
you realize that you are in freezing rain.

In a minute your plane will be unflyable. You need to decide quickly what to
do and you can't start thinking or reasoning about what's the best course of
action: you gotta be ready with the course of action already and it needs to
be instinctive to bug out of Dodge.