I am not making myself clear. I am not advocating training in flying IMC or IFR. I am advocating the same cautionary experience that currently pertains to spinning - a demonstration of exactly how dangerous flying into IMC is going to be for someone who is not Instrument rated and current.
Leadsled apparently already practices what i am proposing and has achieved the desired outcome - a healthy respect for IMC that cannot be intellectualised away and that no amount of "get there-itis" can overcome:
Accordingly, at the end of training, I have always taken my students into real IMC, always a bit of fair weather slightly bumpy Cu.
This is where 178 Seconds to Live is wrong. I have always timed "Handing over" to loss of control, the best was around one minute, usually less.
So you are effectively dead when you lose control, the balance of 178 seconds is only the time it takes to hit the ground.
Having had the opportunity, during training, to spin/spiral out of control in IMC, none of my many students has ever had a VMC into IMC accident.
Several have landed in paddocks when that was the alternative, because they already knew, in advance, what the outcome of flying into IMC would be.
They created a job for the insurance adjuster, not the Coroner. Incontestably a better outcome.
If I had to change Leadys post at all it would be to add the words "for them" in the sense that "this is what is going to happen to you, personally, if you fly into IMC.". I say this because in my opinion, under pressure to go to some place or get home, pilots press on when they should not, by intellectualising away the risks - "anyway, thanks to my foggles training I can always turn around in the cloud and get straight back out".
In my own very limited experience I was once returning to Melbourne from the North in deteriorating weather. The Kilmore Gap looked closed to me when I reached my decision point at Mangalore. I diverted to Bendigo after making sure that I could still head back to Swan Hill or Benalla if necessary and on the way was confronted with rain, decreasing visibility and a decreasing ceiling that was barely just 1000ft AGL as I made Bendigo and landed. I was just VFR at Bendigo. Not to put to fine a point on it, I was ****ting myself. AFter an hour or so on the ground the rain stopped, the ceiling lifted to about 1500 - 2000 and we made our way home via Ballarat and into the Melbourne basin via the You Yangs. If I had pushed on instead of landing, I would have been a statistic either near Kilmore or Ballarat.