Flying VFR into marginal weather without the ability to climb into the
murk and call the nice folks on the dark room is really, really,
gambling with your life and those who are with you...
I have pushed Jay and others several times to get the IR...
XM will not bail someone out if the air suddenly turns opaque all
around you - and it can do that in just minutes...

A case in point: on a Sunday night we were flying West along Lake Erie
from Northern NY state with my wife, daughter and her husband and the
weather was snotty and getting worse... I had suggested we call it a
day and continue on Monday, but Luan and Mike were determined to get
home that night and kept whining... I let myself get pushed beyond my
good judgement... So there we were, 15-20 miles West of Cleveland-
Hopkins and 5 miles offshore, pitch black night, solid overcast, dead
smooth ride as promised by FSS, you could see lights sparkling along
the shore... I looked down at my Howie Keefe and shuffled pages around
so I had the proper IFR low level enroute and the approach plate for a
planned landing at Port Clinton about 40 miles ahead... This probably
took 30-45 seconds of fiddling... I looked up and saw - nothing -
nada, zilch, zippo... It was impenetrable purple in every direction...
And while I sat there with a stupid look on my face for maybe 10
seconds (I had automatically started instrument scan so no one else in
the plane noticed anything had changed) I knew the brown stuff had hit
the fan...
Long story short, FSS was apologetic when I called them later as they
had not predicted the lake to go ballistic which didn't help me a bit
at the time.. The FSS specialist said he had many years in the Great
Lakes and had never seen the lake just explode like it did that
night...
I already had Cleveland ATC dialed on the second radio with the volume
down old habits... Turned up the volume and told the nice man in the
dark room that I was wading in brown stuff... He had me climb into
the murk and gave me a vector towards the IAF for the ILS to 24L and
as I climbed and turned to that direction it only took a moment to get
the approach plate on top and dial up the ILS and the DME... As it
turned out we popped out of some scud at 7 miles from the airport and
there was a 777 off to our right shooting the ILS he looked like a
christmas tree he had so many lights on so I just made a curving
right and followed him down until I picked up the rabbit...

Now, could ATC have vectored me in if I were a VFR pilot? Maybe...
Maybe not... By the time they vectored a confused and scared VFR pilot
the CB that pounded across the field ten minutes after we landed might
have been a real problem...

denny