"Jon Kraus" wrote:
Right away I spotted something wrong with the attitude indicator. It
was
looking like I was in a steep climbing turn. Oh **** I thought great
time for the AI to go out. I had a weird feeling of ending up as an
Aftermath column.

Holy sh**!

[snip good job of getting back on the ground]

Here is what I'll do different next time:

1. Make sure that I have had the vacuum indicator "in the green" for
several minutes before departing to ensure that the gyros are spooled
up.

2. Have the approach for returning to the airport loaded or in
standby just in case you need to return quickly. I did not do this and
it added needless stress loading everything.

My first thought if I have trouble in IMC is to get to VMC if I can do
it quickly. Did you have any idea of where the tops were? If you could
have made a short, straight ahead climb above the clouds, your
destination was in the clear; you could have avoided a bunch of IMC
maneuvering with a flaky AI.
--
Dan
C172RG at BFM