DFC,
I am fascinated (and shocked by) the unexpected VMC into IMC trial that you were party to.
From your post it sounds like the trial was
1 - Take some current ME/IR (maybe some SE/IRs) as well and put them into a simulator with good visuals (sufficient to fly VFR)
2 - Drop them into full IMC with freezing conditions and fail (maybe gradually) the airspeed indicator
3 - watch what happens. (and most of them crash within a few minutes)
If I have outlined the correct scenario I am absolutely astonished that there is such a high level of loss of control from current ME/IR pilots. I would be interested to know more about it and if the issue was the inability of a "typical" IR pilot to shift mental gears into flying on the gauges with out warning or was it more about not being able to deal with flying with an ASI giving misleading information.
The reason I am interested is that when I did my original training a lot of time was spent on simulated system failures and how to recover -even when these were totally unexpectedly never induced a loss of control.
If the problem was more about shifting mental gears - what was it about the experiment that made it so difficult as compared to the routine practice of entering cloud on an IFR flight.
Last edited by mm_flynn; 8th Jun 2005 at 12:12.