Page 16 - Volume 17 Number 4

Takeoff was into unseasonably lack of familiarity with the area ground. It was hard to see very farwarm weather and calmwinds. The mood was jovial, but slightly tense – the pilot was not used to flying visually in five- mile visibility, which resulted from muggy, warm haze. The passenger was on his second flight in a light airplane, and his first cross-country trip in the King Air. As the flight progressed, an overhanging shelf of clouds began to form and settle gradually closer to the ground. The pilot couldn’t reach ATC to pick up a clearance. He calmed his passenger: “Don’t worry, I think it’ll get better soon.”But the thickening clouds served only to darken the haze as the flight progressed. Forced ever lower to remain clear of clouds, the pilot’s pulse increased from14 • TWIN & TURBINEAPRIL 2013and his inexperience with low- altitude navigation. Tiny streams of water began to flow up the windscreen in the slipstream, a misty rain that reduced forward visibility even more. Strange, the pilot thought; the nearest weather reporting points on the iPad at his side showed VMC.Still, the pilot calmly voiced to the silent stare of his passenger, “We’ll fly out from under this cloud soon, and the visibility will improve.” Somewhere in the back of his mind, he recalled that half of all VFR into IMC crashes involve instrument-rated pilots.The cockpit rain-noise increased into a pelting roar. The pilot eased the airplane slightly lower to maintain visual contact with theforward through the rain-strewn windshield; every now and then a small shred of low-level cloud, the scud layer, flashed past the side windows, some even below the plane. He was still following a GPS-direct course, but the moving map told him little about man- made obstacles, and it was getting difficult to relate nearby features viewed through masking rain to the crisp, map-like images on the GPS screen. Maybe he should have sprung for the synthetic vision upgrade, the pilot thought.The pilot was beginning to be visibly nervous. His passenger, nearly silent to this point, looked at the pilot in a state of mortal fear. “Just what made you think,” he asked, as the cockpit grewTwin Proficiency:I Think It’s