C-172 down at HPN - 2 fatalities

"A.Coleman" wrote in message
. ..
The damned ceiling couldn't have been more than 500 feet. Temp/dewpoint
spread was zero. Says something about American Flyers that it's taking a
primary student up shooting instrument approaches in low IMC .

Was it _expected_ low IMC? When I was learning to fly, my instructor (13,000
hour ATPL) took me out in IMC with a cloudbase of 800 feet and two potential
diversions to where the weather was nice just in case. The forecast said 800
feet for the rest of the day, and ATC said 800 feet when we started down the
ILS. We went around at 500 feet (still in IMC) on the first attempt, just so
we could resolve the conflict between what we heard and what we saw, and on
the second attempt (at which point ATC's observations had been revised)
popped out of the bottoms at 300 feet.

The experience was most rewarding and educational. At no time was there any
danger, we were well within the restrictions of the instructor's licence,
the instructor was extremely experienced in IMC flying, training and
examining (in fact he was my IMC rating examiner a couple of years later)
and we had diversions just in case everything got foggy.

It's not fair, then, to suggest that taking a student out in IMC was a bad
thing to do. In my case it taught me how to not kill myself by inadvertently
flying into a cloud (something that I'm not convinced you can learn properly
on a nice day with foggles on). The only caveat here, though, is that the
zero spread between temperature and dewpoint would have made me think twice.

D.