I would consider any pilot not instrument rated who has found themselves in IMC an emergency, regardless of if it is that pilot’s fault or not. The video below was posted by Air Safety Institute to raise awareness of how deadly it is for non-IR rated pilots who fly into IMC.
Yes, VFR into IMC itself is most definitely an emergency. If you encounter it due to your own negligence or by complete accident, declare and make it out alive.
My two points for the conversation:
You cant use the emergency power prescribed in 91.3 as a scapegoat for your bad decisions. Pilots need to have good aeronautical decision making, and single pilot resource management (if alone, or CRM with a crew). If a pilot lacks this, they will end up being a statistic (its grim but true).
You dont just randomly find yourself in IMC. Take a look below:
https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/air-safety-institute/accident-analysis/vfr-into-imc/ntsb
2A) NTSB reports do not attribute crashes to a single cause, they often list several causes which often happen in succession. There are several models that explain the concept, such as the Swiss Cheese, 5M, SHELL, etc…
I want to reiterate that I said it was my personal opinion that poor pilot planning (alone) is not a valid emergency declaration. I stand by my statement because “poor pilot planning” is 100% preventable. Do your due dilligence.
Potential loss of human life on the otherhand is an emergency, and that is what i believe to be the reasoning behind the current legislation. I did not in any way mean to insinuate my opinion to be of fact in accordance to the FAR/AIM, or what happens in real life. If it came across that way, I apologize for the miscommunication.
I think we were in agreement. My point was simply that inadvertent flight into IMC constitutes an emergency, regardless of if the pilot is to blame for poor planning.
As you said, it is inexcusable since it can be easily avoided by doing your due diligence.
I agree with your statements and think I misinterpreted your comment that I quoted above.
That’s a great reference.
In particular giving me pause for thought from your link:
“Notably, few accidents even mention the pilots declaring an emergency, which all these situations warrant.”
35 of the 110 fatal accidents in figure 5 were instrument rated. That’s nearly 1/3.
“Concerning is the reversal of accidents for instrument-rated commercial and ATP pilots. While all ATP pilots hold an instrument rating, accidents involving commercial pilots with instrument ratings outpace their non-instrument-rated counterparts two to one”
“These fatal accidents are mostly preventable, and while conventional wisdom states that these pilots failed to properly understand the weather, the data suggests that the argument is much more complex.”
Perhaps complexity is best captured by: “VFR into IMC is insidious”
And all that implies, both in terms of psychology, currency and other aspects of experience and training.
I’ve never seen it, and I feel like the issue would have to be fairly localized (a thunderstorm moves over the airport). But that’s not to say it’s impossible. Crazier things have happened for sure, but I think to unexpectedly find yourself in conditions where SVFR is your only legal means to complete the fight something was missed in the planning phase.
As @SuperJet115 mentioned it is an emergency. The pilot can absolutely be at fault for that emergency, and I didn’t mean for my comment to come off as saying declaring an emergency is a get out of jail free card. At best that debrief with the FAA will be awkward, but that still beats a flaming hole in the ground.
If you want to make your flight realistic, google “is (insert plane here) ifr aproved” and youll get the result. Then, when making a flight plan in simbrief, select the ifr or vfr option, depending on what you want
Yes, we agree VFR into IMC is an emergency.
The results of poor pilot planning can cause emergencies. VFR into IMC being one of them, fuel exhaustion another, the list goes on.
Poor pilot planning itself, in my opinion, is not because it is 1000% preventable. We can agree to disagree.
The whole point was discussing the legality of the current airplanes in IF in their current state. Not neccesarily debating their real life counterparts.
But might there be more frequent exceptions due to local weather peculiarities? For example, though I don’t have first-hand experience, I heard mention “lake effect snow” which was described as:
“lake effect snow can develop very suddenly, sometimes with little warning from weather briefings. This rapid development is due to the localized nature of the phenomenon…common around the Great Lakes in North America”
Yes it is possible for rapid weather changes, just not super common.
In this video from FlightChops, basically exactly what you have just described above happens. Visibility drops quite rapidly, and he has some tough decisions to make. Very good watch.
While this is true, there are 2 primary ingredients required for lake effect snow/rain to form.
The further distance in temperature, the stronger the lake effect precipitation will be. In addition, lake effect snow only forms on the downwind side of the lake, so in that regard it is easy to predict. Here is a couple of articles regarding the phenomenon, i find it quite interesting myself.
https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2012/december/flight-training-magazine/weather
Lake effect precipitation is a pretty localized phenomenon, and really only two areas of the US (Great Lakes region and the Great Salt Lake) get it with any frequency. In many ways, they are similar to thunderstorms in their ability to pop up quickly and move quickly, but with notable differences in formation. I don’t think lake effect precipitation really has a significant bearing on whether a regulation should exist. While individual cells are hard to forecast, its formation mechanisms are well understood, and it can be fairly reliably forecast for impacted regions. Again, all goes back to good preflight planning. Not to mention the list of aircraft equipped for flight into known icing conditions but not IFR is extremely small, likely approaching zero.
Worth noting “warm” is very much a relative term in this context. It requires temperatures about 20 degrees different between the water and the 850mb level air, the water is often barely above freezing, but the phenomenon can occur at warmer temperatures and produce rain as well. Almost everything in meteorology is driven by temperature differences, so cold and colder works too lol
Mentioned here:
I will however clarify “colder” and “warmer” to indicate they are subjective to each other. Thanks!
Your link is a fascinating example to watch, emphasizing the hazard of the psychological reluctance to turn back.
(amplified personally because I visited his destination airport with other kids the one year I was living in a cold climate as a kid).
Thanks, that info was interesting. I grew up in warm weather climates, so this potential hazard and how it works was new to me.
As for the implication of a different weather phenomena, what do you think of just after 1:27 in the following?:
MARGINAL WEATHER FLYING Operations - ATC special VFR clearance departing / arriving class D airspace - YouTube
Where at one point he says: “in those circumstances, we use SVFR all the time”
Also, 5:47 into this is an interesting dilemma:
Special VFR into John Wayne
edit: For anyone questioning VFR vs IFR in the irl context as an aid to clarifying questions in the IF context, the following is perhaps a straightforwardly useful “encyclopedic” breakdown between the two:
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