Hi all-
I'm after thoughts from you IFR charter guys on a (purely hypothetical) scenario.
Lets say we have a fairly low-hour PPL along as a passenger on a charter flight in a typical piston twin. To make things easier, lets call him Ralph. He doesn't know the pilot and has never flown with this operator before.
Ralph is working on his Commercial and is also concurrently halfway through his CIR training, and is therefore keenly interested in how more experienced pilots operate IFR in the real world. He is therefore keeping his eyes open during the trip, but is sitting up the back well out of the pilot's way.
So the flight departs into solid IMC, which gives way to VMC during the cruise, albeit with a bit of weather still hanging about. Also, it is just passing last light.
Approaching the destination, now in darkness, the town lights and runway lights are clearly visible from TOD. The aircraft descends, and looks to be tracking straight to the field, as if to do a normal overfly and join downwind, as you would if VFR. As far as he can tell with his limited experience and restricted view from up the back, the aircraft is not on a published approach or arrival procedure. There are a few ridges near the strip with radio towers on them, on the dead side of the circuit.
As the aircraft gets closer to the field, Ralph sees that there is some scattered to broken low cloud on the far side of the field, which was not visible during the let-down. Ralph starts to feel uneasy as the aircraft proceeds to overfly the runway, enter the cloud, turn downwind and base while in and out of it, before getting clear during the turn to finals and then landing normally. Ralph thinks that during all this, the aircraft was below the MDA for all the approaches he knows of into this strip, but would love to be reassured that he is wrong, or that this is normal and OK.
Now, up until this last bit, Ralph has not had the slightest cause for alarm during the trip. The guy up front seems to know what he is doing, and didn't strike Ralph as a cowboy. Ralph also doesn't want to ask the him about it in front of the other passengers, or come across as a back-seat driver without getting his facts straight. Also, he knows that the airfield appeared to be VFR until quite close, so the initial cloud entry was probably not deliberate.
In this scenario, which is of course purely make believe, would our friend Ralph be correct to be a bit worried, or is he just being a sook? Is there perhaps something he might have missed? And for those of you doing this sort of thing day in day out, how often would you fly a visual circuit in preference to an approach procedure, only to find yourself in and out of crud you didn't see coming?
Any thoughts?
