Originally Posted by
aa777888
Paul--it's amazing that after all my follow up posts that anyone would think that I would intentionally fly into IMC. I never meant to imply that in any way. There must be a phenomenal number of low timers that do that, given the automatic and emotional responses to my initial post. My primary purpose in posting was simply to point out that an R44 is not uncontrollable on instruments, as some seemed to believe. I should hope that all of my follow up posts have made that clear. The replies made it equally clear that hood time didn't count as "with reference only to instruments". That was somewhat of a revelation.
aa777888,
I hope you don't think I was implying that you would intentionally fly into IMC. I was just reacting to the statement about "it's not nearly as difficult as you think". I'm also guilty of responding before reading all 6 pages (at the time) of this thread, so my reply was also somewhat redundant with what some of the other people said.
In any case, you are certainly right that there were a lot of emotional responses, and yeah, because we've seen far too many fatal IMC encounters over the years.
crab - They say a peek is worth a thousand scans - but only if what you see when you peek is useful (like the horizon).
I hadn't heard that before, but it's certainly true. I was flying the ILS into KHVN (New Haven Connecticut) which brings you in over the water (and directly over what used to be my uncle's farm). I was under the hood, and scanning the instruments, but a little tiny bit of the chin bubble was visible out of the corner of my eye, and the waves going by at an odd angle down by my feet was inducing all kinds of vertigo effects. It's pretty hard to ignore something like that, even though it's way out of the center of your vision.
In any case aa777888, hope you don't feel too picked on, and thanks for starting a very interesting thread-within-a-thread
