Originally Posted by
AlexJR
It's not rubbish to say that flying with an instructor teaches you to deal with unexpected weather conditions. When you are driving a car, did your instructor teach you how to avoid aqua planing or tell you it's raining, therefore too dangerous - go home.
The fact is we live in the UK and unless you want to fly once every 8 weeks on the weekend in perfect sunshine, there may be rain that comes and goes, or in the winter rain/snow that blows through quickly. I would not plan a long distance flight in these conditions and don't have the experience to do so, but local with a risk of a shower? for sure, unless of course the forecast is for CBs etc. Icing is a whole other issue and not one to which my original post makes reference.
The point is you don't plan to fly through rain for an hour, but if you are up and it happens, you need to know how to deal with it in a calm and measured way. Learning to be a pilot is learning when not to go flying at all, but it is also dealing with challenging situations calmly when they arise - the pilot mentality. For me, this is learning from someone more experienced than myself not to "panic" in a rain shower, or if the clouds drop to 500ft. In the scary situation mentioned above where icing occurred, did the person learn from an instructor what to do if icing occurs? We learn from our instructor's experience so we don't make the same mistakes - even if what we learn is to stay on the ground that day!
Comparing driving a car in the rain, and flying in the rain, I am not sure if I understand that analogy. If you think the 2 are equal, than I don't have the energy to explain you the difference, if you can't see that yourself.
The only good example I can use though regarding driving, is when it comes snow and iced roads, having lived many years in winter countries, I am well aware how to safely drive in winter conditions, however to do it I must have the right equipment, and to use UK as an example, you don't have the right equipment for driving in winter conditions and most have no clue of how to drive in winter conditions. It's very simple, nobody in Scandinavia would go out driving like they do in the UK when it comes snow and icy roads, because they know it's not safe.
So equally why would you go flying into weather, when you know you don't have the right equipment to manage various weather condition, flying trough a weather not knowing if it might effect your safety, that's just bad airmanship, it might work fine 9 out of 10 times, you might have one day, as you are most likely not a Met expert, and you have limited experience with such weather, and that one day you might just get caught out. I have seen ice build up fairly rapidly on a couple of occasions, but that aircraft had wing and engine anti-ice.
Regarding instructors, most instructors I have dealt with have been very competent indeed, however a smart pilot will not go out experimenting in dodgy weather conditions. This includes smart instructors too, if I was instructing I would not want teach my students bad habits and bad airmanship.
In life sometimes we don't need to learn from having a bad experience, because in aviation that can be your last. A good pilot will avoid any adverse weather conditions, there is no need to even take a calculated risk. Flying a SEP like C172, you don't have sufficient equipment to know how bad the situation is around you. Since we are talking about UK, besides a few months in the summer, when you have warm weather, most of the year the temperature above 2000 ft will be below 10 C, so that means there is a potential icing risk, add to that the extreme humid weather you have in the UK, I would be careful flying in rain. The rain will not all of a sudden appear out of no where, and the risk of ending in cloud is equally dangerous, as you can have pretty strong winds at 2000 - 3000 ft in the UK.