Originally Posted by
blackdog7
At a recent session at Flight Safety, the instructor suggested if you encounter IMC conditions, you should climb until above the cloud layer.
If you fly in the flat lands around Dallas, perhaps that would work.
But if you’re in the mountains or in a valley, that will most likely be a fatal mistake.
SVFR or VFR means maintaining visual contact with the ground, not rocketing through the scud at 130knots and initiating a climb.
First thing that should be done as wx deteriorates is to slow down, maintain visual contact with the ground, and turn around if there is a wall of fog off the nose.
The older age one achieves, the easier it is to just say “no”.
This was CFIT or the pilot had a jammer.
In an inadvertent IMC encounter, I don't see how a turn maneuver among valleys and peaks is any safer than a climb, I'd expect just the opposite. You know that above you somewhere is the MSA and hopefully VFR-on-top conditions, both hopefully not too far up. In this case he could have climbed to relative safety fairly quickly and requested assistance. I think the charted MSA is 5200, but his actual collision risk would drop off sharply at 2300 and be almost nil above 3000. More importantly, in an inadvertent IMC encounter simply staying straight and level while performing a max-angle climb is a lot easier than some box-canyon turn in unexpected IMC. Your solutions only work ahead of time, not after the IMC encounter. The trick here is to quickly realize that the situation has already gotten out of control and the risk of a spacial disorientation upset or hitting terrain at your level is much higher than randomly climbing into something. Nobody want to be climbing blind even for a minute, but in this case it would probably be the least bad option.