Subject close to my heart, this is.
I had the pleasure of meeting, flying with and later the friendship of Col. Carl Crane. After he'd tumbled out of clouds in an open cockpit aircraft - with a senator's son on board - he spent a lot of his life devoted to teaching instrument flying and inventing blind landing systems. He was still flying days before his death at 79 years of age. In that era, he was an honorary lecturer at Randolph AFB's Advanced instrument flying school, mostly talking about the old days of course. Some of the tales were fabulous.
To any aviation enthusiast, he's really worth a Gooogle.
I had a total instrument failure in a DC3 due to loss of vacuum. Well, not quite total, I'd learned that gyros took time to rumble to a full stop and while they were useless for horizons, the turn and slip still showed a tiny movement for quite a while. I got a cloud-break from that somewhere around Kirkwall.
You may have noticed, I've bellyached about taking tied gyros out of transport aircraft for about 40 years.