Possible scenarios:-
(1) Highly experienced captain with good situational awareness permanently about to climb into IMC if it got too bad but it never quite did.
(2) Crap weather but line feature to destination, competent pilot flying field to field using the road as reference prepared to make a field landing if it got too bad, but it never quite did.
(3) Idiot out of his depth who somehow got away with it.
(4) Visibility along the flight route rather better than it appeared from the ground.
I think I've been in all four of those at some point in my flying career. Certainly I'd not be worried about landing a C150 in a field - it's an excellent short field aeroplane. It also flies slowly well - and in such conditions visibility is much more important measured in time rather than distance.
Regardless, if it was me on the ground seeing it, I don't think that I'd post on a forum about it in quite this manner. I *might* phone the CFI / club chairman where the aircraft came from, if I knew them, for a private chat to suggest that he should have a chat to make sure that any necessary learning points had been made.
However, you can see why one might want to blow a bit of steam off after seeing something that seems a bit daft. So I'd not judge Spanner that harshly.
But a comment about mindsets. A year or so ago I was flying (as it happens with another forum member who may recognise the scenario if they read this) a microlight home from a long all day navex. The weather was forecast to deteriorate significantly, but it did so around 4-6 hours earlier than forecast and I got trapped in a valley VFR - in a VFR only aeroplane, with no way out. Oh well, I landed on a golf course, without incident, and was eventually able to fly out again solo a few days later - I didn't even get charged green fees.
The interesting thing about it afterwards however was the response of various types of pilot I told the story to:-
Light aircraft pilots: "YOU DID WHAT? ARE YOU MAD?"
Microlight pilots: (brief pause for thought) "Yes, good call, well done.
Glider pilots: "So what? that's not even a good story".
Which is just to make the point that different pilots, with different perspectives, may see these things very differently. We should all bear that in mind before criticising other people's flying.
G
Last edited by Genghis the Engineer; 3rd Nov 2013 at 22:09.