Flying VFR into IMC - a top KILLER of pilots - My close call!

Reviewing this footage, it's hard to believe I filmed this. Here I am, Scud running 1500 feet above the ground with barely three miles of visibility and it got worse before I reached my destination, so how did a safe and conscientious pilot like me get into this? Situation, please bear with me as I guide you through what should have been a routine flight, but ended up being the

close

st

call

I've ever had almost

flying

VFR in IMC conditions at the time of this flight. He had more than 15 years of experience. I was

flying

VFR and had never exceeded my limits anywhere near legal weather minimums;

However, after this flight, I was inspired to take on the challenge of IFR training. This

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situation motivated me to at least get the training to give myself an extra margin of safety, so I started with a day that was reported to be a good VFR with a strong but acceptable northerly wind. I did my due diligence and checked the weather and NOTAMs online and even did an official weather briefing over the phone. I would be flying with a pilot friend who I fly with regularly with the plan being a bit of a mission so it put a little pressure on me to schedule but we were up for it and I always loved a specific reason to fly.

I keep currency on several different types of planes at two different local airports, so sometimes it's hard to keep up with the pace for the first flight. I was to fly 172 from my home base on Toronto Island, a Class C control zone, and my friend was to fly from Burlington Airport. an uncontrolled local airport in a Piper that I also fly and was due to catch my monthly flight. He lives closer to Burlington so I plan to fly there and meet him with the 172 from Toronto and then travel and swap seats for a quick local. flight in the Piper, he doesn't have as much experience in controlled airspace as I do, so he opted to drive up to pick me up and carpool to Toronto to ride the 172 for the flight to Burlington where we parked the 172 and then Fly the Piper for a few circuits each and then returning the Piper and I would take us back to Toronto on the 170.

Still with me, all this to say that it was a relatively complicated plan in terms of logistics, but the distance wasn't very far. The weather was supposed to still be good VFR, so I thought it would be fun to do it on a Sunday afternoon. The outbound flight was completely routine and uneventful and I expected the same for the return trip home. The only potential problem for the day was the lake effect snow streamers. or northern storms there are large bodies of water north of Toronto and the wind was quite strong from the north, but the initial weather report assured me that the streamers would not reach as far south as Toronto and on the outbound flight confirmed that that seemed to be case, the weather was beautiful and clear, it's worth noting that lake effect snow is a very localized phenomenon and often on lake effect days you can have beautiful flights anywhere specifi

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y upwind of the lakes, but downwind of the lakes you can really get it.

Some pretty nasty weather in very localized areas as we reached Burlington, it seemed fair to let my friend take the first turn in the left piper seat, so I wrote and enjoyed the view, visibility and sky conditions were still excellent, as you can see. However, after the first or second loop it occurred to me that while we were on the descending leg, visibility towards Toronto had definitely decreased and the city was now completely darkened and then a plane arriving from the east also reported that conditions were They were degrading, so when my friend finished logging his time.

I decided to delay my flight on the Piper and double check the weather for the return flight. I called the local flight service station for a briefing and discovered that my suspicions were correct and that the northerly wind had picked up and there was a After all, a solid streamer was heading towards Toronto, there was a good amount of activity of snow, but the tipster assured me that the visit was expected to last more than five miles, something I would never want to fly in, even though it is legal and the ceiling was supposed to stay above 2000 on this period, I canceled my flight on the Piper, which was nice because they actually imposed a 60-day coin in Burlington if you have more than 150 hours of total time, but I still like to stick to a personal minimum. of a 30 day coin on each type I fly, if I can, regarding personal minimums, I also have personal weather minimums for cross-country flights, which are six miles of visibility and 3000 foot ceilings, wind gusts not exceeding 20 knots, so in this case I was already suddenly below my personal weather minimums, the decision should have been to just not do it if I was home and this was a fun local flight.

I wouldn't even consider taking off in five mile visibility with 2,000 foot ceilings, it just wasn't a fun condition to fly in, but I wasn't home and my friend's car was stranded at the other airport. This is a classic. Get your itis or go home is a typical situation but it was very easy to try to rationalize that it was only 23 miles. away, a 13 minute flight visit is still looking pretty good here in Burlington and was forecast to remain legal in Toronto, so I decided to try my personal minimums and do it with relative confidence, it hadn't really occurred to me that it might follow worse. in the brief window of the return flight, but it was, here are the meters and the special facility that were emitted while flying, pause the video if you want to decode them, but the bottom line is that three species were emitted in the space of one. hour because things were changing and degrading relatively quickly and here's the radar showing what was happening, a super localized lake effect snow streamer was parked right over Toronto, so I happily took off into this relatively clear sky over Burlington, but things were changing quite quickly even though I had received weather information a few minutes before departure, this pit was definitely thickening and moving further south and I was heading straight for it.

I don't normally look at the radar while flying with my phone, but now that we have these tools on board, especially for flights etc., you can really get some pretty amazing information in real time, even for basic VFR flights, and I have a little app that helps me. allows you to see the radar in real time, and if I had done that I may have changed my mind along the way because I would have had more accurate information in real time and as you can see, this radar now is quite different from the one in the morning, so which still had the image in my head of the snow storms that were coming.

Further north, I really couldn't have imagined they would be so dense this far south towards Toronto, this flight took place at the beginning of my GoPro flight. I didn't have the intercom audio figured out at the time and I also mishandled the batteries trying to film the flights in both the 172 and the Piper, but honestly, I was most worried about getting footage for my friend in the Piper. I wasn't that worried about filming my totally routine flight in the 172, so this is also a great lesson, just to remember that no flight is routine, you should always expect the unexpected and that lesson is not lost on me, but anyway , unfortunately my view camera died on the way home so I didn't get any footage of the latter.

On this flight it really started to get scary. I still have a bit of the view from the other camera I was using to trigger the instruments, but I wish I had the other angle to check how bad the visibility became, but I have enough. The information and waypoints were very clear and what I got, so I was able to put together a pretty interesting animation to track the last part of the flight that we followed for most of this flight and the visibility was initially acceptable, but the intensity of Snow. was rising and the ceiling ended up falling to about 1700 feet.

My plan was to fly home at 2000 when we were delivered to the Toronto Island Tower. Conditions deteriorated relatively quickly. I contacted the tower before getting ADIS because I was starting to get distracted. My 2000 feet was no longer working at this point, we were about 10 miles away so I dropped down to 1500 feet and the visibility seemed to stay the same or get slightly worse at about 2 miles. I asked the tower for an update on visibility and he said. They were reporting 3 miles. I made it clear that I didn't think I had that kind of visibility at 1,500 feet, of course, that's when the vision camera battery died, but using these landmarks here, the breakwater and the marina ahead, I was able to analyze and post here that my visit estimate was less than 3 miles and continued to decrease as we got closer, they used the audio I pulled from the live ATC network, sorry for the quality, I said, I have an update on your visibility.

I'm at 1,500 feet now let's look at the two miles here their defense. I love that last bit, how I'm weakening myself when I talk about dropping to 15 when I'm already at 15. He's clearly a VFR guy. I bit off more than I could chew because I knew I couldn't go any lower. I seriously considered doing a 180 degree turn when we were about 6 miles away when the visitor opted for what I estimated to be less than 2 miles under a murky, undefined ceiling of 1,500. At this point I had almost outgrown my neighborhood so the landmarks were very familiar and it was helpful to know that the coast would take me straight to the airport and that gave me a sense of security, but that's not something you can take. to the bank when you risk flying VFR into IMC, now to be clear where my head was at, that in terms of risk assessment, part of my decision to go ahead was that I knew I had clean air not far behind me and I was confident that if I hit a wall of snow and suddenly found myself in full IMC conditions, I could transition to the instruments, execute the emergency 180 turn while reporting to ATC, and be back in the open in a relatively short time. , but I can not.

Denying the fact that getting his ideas or going home was also a big part of the decision to push my friend who was looking at nothing but white to his right and in front, so I know he was a little more nervous than I was. , so there were definitely some adrenaline-filled moments while we waited for our options and a good note to mention at this point is that when you fly with a fellow pilot you want to make sure that you have a good relationship and a good dynamic and that you don't find yourself in a situation where they both end up being passengers, my friend took the opportunity at that moment to remind me that he was referring to me as photo 2.

He makes that decision 180 because I have a little more experience than he does and I was PSE, but I came close to doing that 180. I followed the coastline but didn't see any part of the airport until less than two miles away and just when I was almost giving up hope, the airport came into view and even then I only saw part of it. track 0-8, it was pretty strange not being able to see the entire field, so it's actually cool to analyze contacts like this by looking at it with a graph and in table terms. We're less than two miles from this is the part of the map you're looking at, so if you can imagine being somewhere where the landmarks weren't obvious, I mean, forget it, dead reckoning just isn't possible, so yes, visibility was very poor. that I couldn't even see the other end of a 4000 foot runway when I was a mile or two away.

It would have been nice to be able to land directly on that eastbound runway I was looking at, but I knew the wind was really strong from the north and the tower confirmed that the report 320 at 18 gusts 25, which is much higher than forecast, which explains why the snow had gotten so far south, so landing in that kind of crosswind wasn't going to be an option at 0 8 so I was cleared downwind for runway 3 3. It was pretty scary doing that turn and looking out the front window at the water looking nothing but white and I flew a very tight circuit keeping that airport in sight. left window and my shift finally threw full flaps and flew a very steep approach just to lower it.

This view here, you can see a little bit of the track there once I get to the final, so it wasn't until I got there. In a short file I could see the buildings starting to appear through the snow just north of the airport, so the snow was actually continuing to thicken as I flew and I had no intention of missing this landing despite the 15 gusts 25 there were. . in fact, one of the best landings I've made in a long time, so I'd be lying if I didn't admit that as I was coming back I noticed my feet were shaking a little on the rudder pedals.I was definitely happy to be able to do it.

I'll be on the ground after this one, once the engine sound was a little quieter, you can hear some of our conversation about it. I'll let that play at the end here after my disclaimer, after parking the plane, I called the flight service station. to introduce the next PI representative, they were very happy to receive it because it was becoming clear that things were changing rapidly and the real climate was not reflected in the reports, so if you made it to the end, I really appreciate you watching this. Probably the hardest video I've ever had to make was the most work I've ever put into editing one of these things and I also sat on this footage for almost a year trying to figure out how and if I wanted to share it. this, but I think at the end of the day this is the kind of thing worth sharing, ironically it actually gave me confidence to get through it, but it definitely inspired me to start IFR training.

I still intend to fly for fun. and especially when the weather is good, I have no intention of flying a real BMI much once I get my instrument rating, if I manage to achieve it, it seems like an insurmountable task, although I am finishing the training, but if you want If you want to fly for fun or If you've been flying for a long time, I recommend you go with an instructor and do some real IMC flying. Do some additional instrument training, even if you have no intentions of getting your instrument rating, just get some experience with the instruments. instruments and develop some confidence to know you can handle it if it happens.

Anyway, I'm just a private pilot and I've been flying for a long time, but I don't fly tons, so on every flight I try to get as much out of it as I can. I make these videos for my own self-analysis purpose and I will be happy to share them for more virtual flight videos like this. please subscribe and continue, can your flight chop-chop guys? That was awesome, okay, that was okay, we played it today like we all got something out of it. It didn't work. Ciara on Bravo three three. That's exactly that different. There were no clothes lying around. cars, someone from his car was at the same level as him, saying I don't have three miles, buddy, yeah, she was pretty.

He was having a hard time transitioning, as is typical in stories because I lose consciousness, but he was trying both. I do not do it. I know what I needed to know the airport is fine, they're not going to lose my attitude airports right there, but I mean, the reality is that I had no variety, all I could see was the airport that way, that way, not running , yeah, that was great, okay, captain, I was right where you were, although like moles, like seconds away from 180 seconds, incredible