Who Flies Real IFR?

[Bill Greenwood]

How many pilots fly single pilot, single engine in actual IMC conditions? I'm not asking about flying around in vcm weather and on an ifr flight plan and the only thing ifr about it is talking to control.

I have not flown much real imc, probably less than 25 hours. Much of it is because I live in the mountains, so its a life and death matter, not so much as if I was in Florida, and also our weather is usually good, but can be awful and what you'd call hard ifr. And much of my flying has been in planes not really designed for imc.

So, if you really get ready to go to Osh or somewhere and its 600 ft overcast for 500 miles around, do you go anyway?

I'd like to hear where you are and what plane and avionics you use. I don't have GPS, am familiar with vor, ils, equiptment but have never done a GPS approach.

Thanks for any help.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

... Now that I'm in AZ, I rarely get the chance, so it's under the hood for me.

You have to really look for real IMC here in AZ and it is hard to find. Most people who do an instrument rating here get the rating with no actual IMC.

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

That's not only a smaller number, but an exponentially lower number.:

Sort of a personal pet peeve, but we are talking math in the response.

[pedantic]
Many people now use “exponentially” when what they really mean is significantly or greatly. Exponentially originally meant the growth was exponential, like a base raised to a power, like e^x. It does not really apply to a single number.

In this case, the exponent would be a fixed number, 2, for the square of the number being discussed. It is geometric in the number, not exponential.

Here’s a definition from the Cambridge Dictionary:

An exponential rate of increase becomes quicker and quicker as the thing that increases becomes larger:

[/pedantic] :emoji846:

 

[PeterNSteinmetz]

Just because I'm a sucker for pedantry, I would assert that exponential growth (or in this case decay of failure rate) is appropriate here. Just because most of the debate is over singles and twins, as you add more and more and more and more and more engines, the pattern would be expected to continue...

That’s right. If one considers it a function of engine number it would be exponential in terms of the probability of all engines failing.