Originally Posted by
Genghis the Engineer
Being legal does not make you safe. It is incredibly unlikely that anybody will ever make an issue of whether you were in legal VMC or not.
What is safe for you, in your aeroplane, at your experience levels, on the route you're flying? Most cases, most of the time, that will be above legal VMC minima for as long as you remain a VFR pilot.
People will criticise you for going below safe limits for the circumstances. In the highly unlikely event you hit conditions that are safe, but technically illegal - odds are nobody will criticise you for that.
Nicely put.
Nobody will ever care about whether you were flying legal VMC or not (unless maybe you have an accident, but then this will be the least of your concerns).
And talking about a situation in which one is safe but illegal, descending through a thin overcast. One could argue it's a bad planning issue, but if TAF and forecasts say that clouds should be no more than SCT by the time you reach destination, and in reality they are OVC, with nowhere to go that's not 1 hour away because it's an "isolated" aerodrome (say, an island), I can't blame it on the pilot. Legally he should divert, but if the pilot feels safe and competent enough to descend through the deck without crashing the plane, then why not? Some might not agree on this being "safe" and will instantly say "instrument rated = safe" and "non-instrument rated = unsafe". I don't think that's so easy to say, given the fact that many instrument rated pilots have never dealt with real IMC other than the simulator and that many VFR pilots have dozens of hours flying at night, legally, in legal VMC but practically relying solely on instruments.
Many times when I hear accident CVRs in a VFR-into-IMC type accident, the controller asks the question "Are you capable of instrument flight", he doesn't ask whether the pilot is "instrument rated", he asks if he is "capable" because it's different things.