 Welcome, everyone. Eric Basil is our presenter this morning, and he has a lot of aviation experience, both as an instructor and as a LearJet pilot. And Eric feels very strongly that aviation safety is a matter of how we pilots look and talk and think about aviation safety. So our presentation today will be about surviving inadvertent flight into IMC. Eric, please welcome Eric. Good morning. Thank you very much, Kathleen. Thank you, Kathleen, for the kind introduction. Good morning. Welcome to another beautiful morning at Sun & Fun. Happy to be here. As Kathleen said, I'm from Chicago. So Florida weather is very nice. Change as opposed to the sleet we had a few days ago. So happy to be here. Thank you for your commitment to aviation safety. And my topic is surviving inadvertent IMC. It's a very important topic, and I hope that you find it educational and take away a few things from this. But anybody that's seen one of my seminars knows that I always like to start out with a little piece of videotape. And it sometimes has nothing to do with the topic. But this happened down in Louisiana. And I think it kind of illustrates what ends up happening when you become too committed to a particular decision. So we'll see what happened to this guy. Now, thankfully, he was unhurt. But what happened was this gentleman ran out of fuel in a 210 and did a very nice emergency landing to a road in this town. And once he did that, he started looking for a flatbed truck to haul the airplane to an airport. Well, he wasn't able to find a flatbed truck because nothing was wide enough to carry the wheels of the airplane. So after several hours of searching, they finally decided to put a little fuel in the thing and fly it out from there. And unfortunately, he hit the fire truck trying to take off. So the point of this is when anything unusual happens to you and you're flying, it becomes very easy to just try and find a solution to it. And you can often talk yourself into a very difficult situation if anything unusual happens. So back to the subject of inadvertent IMC, what we're going to cover this morning. First of all, why this subject is an important topic. Secondly, we're going to talk about something called spatial disorientation. And spatial disorientation is ultimately the reason why inadvertent IMC accidents happen. Next, we're going to discuss the importance of pre-flight and weather planning in your flying. Also, we're going to discuss something called the 5Cs or how to ask for help when you get in an emergency. And lastly, we're going to stress the importance of practicing your skills. Now, I want to start out by posing a little bit of a rhetorical question to you. And this is probably the reason why I started giving this particular seminar. Now, this event happened in Brooklyn, Iowa, just before Christmas in 2003. I lived in Iowa for about five years. And so this wasn't too far away from where I live. This was a gentleman that was flying from Pawakie Airport in Chicago, which is, as some of you know, is in the suburbs of Chicago. And he was headed back to his home in Ankeny, Iowa. Now, a gentleman was flying a Cherokee 6. He had four persons on board and, unfortunately, crashed into a cornfield and everyone was killed. A very tragic accident. And the weather at Newton, Iowa, which was the closest reporting station to where the accident happened, at the time, it happened about 6.30, 7 o'clock at night. So if you want to picture this in your head, it's about 6.30, 7 o'clock at 9 on a December evening. It's dark. And the weather is winds blow 10 knots, visibility of two miles in light snow with an overcast ceiling of 700 feet and a temperature dew point spread of one degree. But most importantly, the fact remains that this flight was operating under VFR and no flight plan was filed. This gentleman was about a 500-hour private pilot with no instrument rating. And he'd been flying for about 15 years. So I mean, he was a fairly experienced general aviation pilot by most standards, but no instrument rating. And for whatever reason, he decided to attempt this flight under VFR because he wasn't qualified to fly under IFR. And unfortunately, this was what the result. The purpose of the flight was the gentleman's daughter had been over in Spain on a foreign exchange program in college. And so she was coming back into the United States and flew into Chicago. So he flew his plane to O'Hare, to Milwaukee, to pick her up from her airline flight into O'Hare. And so it was bringing her home from Christmas. And it was him, the gentleman's brother, his daughter, and a friend of his daughter. And they all passed away. So this affected me kind of significantly. And so I think if we take a look at this as just an example, we can learn some very important things about this subject. We're going to talk statistics a little bit. First of all, VFR into IMC is the absolute number one cause of all weather-related accidents, more so than flying into thunderstorms, more so than any other thing that you could think of related to weather. So it's a very significant accident cause when we're talking about weather-related accidents. Secondly, we're averaging about 36 accidents of this type per year, a little less than one per week. And it's about 14% of all fatal general aviation accidents. More importantly, however, the rate at which these accidents happen and the fact that they're almost always fatal, this fact hasn't changed since the 70s and neither have the factors which cause these accidents. So it's a very pervasive accident cause in general aviation. And so I think it therefore requires as much energy and dedication as we can devote to it to try to reduce these numbers. Now another reason, I'll get to that in a second, but just first of all a question, how many of these pilots do you think have an instrument rating? You think this just happens to VFR only pilots? No, about a little more than a quarter of these pilots have an instrument rating for whatever reason they're not on an IFR flight plan or they weren't current. Secondly, do you think this only happens to inexperienced pilots? No, I mean it really covers quite a gamut. 44% of these pilots have more than 1,000 hours of total time. In fact, the FAs Civil Aeromedical Institute or CAMI estimates that as an average portrait, the average person that's involved in an accident of this nature is about a 30-year-old guy with at least 10 years or 1,500 hours of flying experience. I'm going to expand that statistic a little bit because in my experience I found that these guys have anywhere from about 300 to 1,500 hours of total time. So the answer, I mean basically the point of this is that it doesn't just happen to low-time pilots. It often happens to very experienced pilots. Another reason why it's very important to talk about this subject is because these accidents are almost universally fatal. As we can see from the graph here, only at least 91% of these accidents result in at least one fatality. And so it's a fatal accident almost all the time and that's largely due to the mechanism of the accident where the airplane is basically out of control because the pilot has become disoriented and therefore the airplane impacts the ground at a high vertical speed and high velocity. We're going to break down the statistics here a little bit and take a look at the graph. The first thing I want you to do is look at the left half of the graph here, so everything to the left here. The first column we have is labeled VFR in IMC and so this is what traditionally people think of. In other words, it's a VFR pilot, not instrument rated, flying into IMC weather conditions. And there are two basic columns here. I'll back up for a second there. There are two columns here. The first is labeled day non-rated. So about 40 some percent of these accidents are happening during the day and then the red column night non-rated is about 40%. So there's about an equal split between day and night of when these accidents happen. The second column is labeled VFR in VMC. Well, you might be saying, well, how does that make sense? Well, oftentimes these accidents happen when the weather conditions are not actually IFR. They're marginal VFR weather conditions. So it might be technically VFR but the pilot still becomes disoriented. Probably the best example of an accident in this column would be the very well-publicized JFK Jr. accident. On the night where he crashed, the weather conditions were actually VFR. It was about four to six miles visibility. However, he was flying at night over open water. So you can see that basically there was no visible horizon available to him and that's why the large majority of the VFR accidents happen at night, as we can see from this red column here. The right half of this graph relates to pilots that are instrument rated. And so disorientation accidents under IFR primarily happen during the day and then also IFR flight planes in visual conditions more often happen at night. So at night there's a significant risk of disorientation even if the weather is not necessarily that bad. We're gonna talk about a few common contributing factors to these accidents. In other words, why do these accidents happen? How many people in this room think that they're a pretty conservative safe pilot? I mean, everybody should be raising their hand. We all think that we're very conservative safe pilots. The problem is, is your mind does funny things to under certain circumstances and it's very easy for you to become pressured into making unsafe decisions even if you're ordinarily a safe pilot. The first thing I wanna talk about is what we call improper judgment of deteriorating weather. The fact is that most pilots don't really have a good idea of how bad the weather is when they're flying around in it. Pilots are not really that good at distinguishing between IMC and marginal VFR weather conditions. To prove this point, the University of Illinois did a study recently where they took student pilots and private pilots and they put them in a flight simulator. They didn't really give them that much information. They just said, we want you to fly from Champaign, Illinois to Terre Haute, Indiana. They gave them all the weather information that they would need to make that flight. So they just got in the plane and they started flying. While unbeknownst to these pilots, the people running the study had programmed the simulator to gradually decrease the weather conditions ultimately to IMC. And what the study was attempting to look at was how long it would take those pilots to realize that they were flying into poor weather conditions and then either make a decision to turn around or divert. And so they were timing to see how long that decision would take. Now, the conclusions from this study were quite interesting. First thing they noticed was that the more experienced pilots flew on into the deteriorating weather much longer. And when they were interviewed afterwards, they often had very high, unreasonably high estimates of what the weather conditions actually were. In other words, they thought the weather was actually better than it was. And secondly, well actually I made both my points there, but it seems a little paradoxical that they would think that. But that was one of the interesting conclusions of the study. And so the other thing is that the inexperienced pilots actually got scared earlier and they turned around earlier. You'd think that they might not know or they might continue to press on, but they diverted instead. Secondly, we have something called underestimating or overconfidence associated with flight in the adverse conditions. And this is simply the fact that pilots may not have a very good idea of what the risks are. You know, we all consider ourselves to be safe pilots and as you build experiences of pilot, you become more confident. And you become more and more confident about your abilities. And the problem is, is that you may not realize what the risks are. The next thing is quite important. And this kind of provides a frame for everything here. And that is social pressures affecting decision making. Compared to all general aviation accidents, VFR and IMC accidents have a very high percentage where passengers are on board. And so you can imagine the fact that the passengers are on board provides some external pressures to the pilot's decision making. So I realize that we all have pressures in our life as much as you do. You're flying a trip, let's say, you go somewhere for the weekend to Lake of the Ozarks or something like that to go canoeing or boating. And then it's time to fly home. Well, you're thinking to yourself, I've got work the next day. I've got work on Monday. My kids have to get back to school. You know, I might have a business deal, something. We've got social commitment or something like that. There's all sorts of things weighing on your mind back home, right? And you want to get home. You don't want to be stuck somewhere and have to pay for an extra night in a hotel, pay for a rental car, have your kids miss school, potentially lose out on some business. You've got all these things going on. And so it's very easy for those things to creep into the forefront of your mind and allow you to start making that decision. Well, you know, maybe it's not that bad. So understand that those social pressures can affect you in your decision making. Now, the next thing I want to talk about is decision framing. Decision framing is how you view a particular decision in terms of whether it is a good decision or a bad decision or whether it's a gain or a loss. And so in this sense, we're looking at the decision to either continue on to the destination or divert. So how many people are familiar with the TV show Deal or No Deal? I mean, pretty much everybody's seen that. Deal or No Deal is, you know, a situation or like let's make a deal where you get some choices and you can either decide what to do. So I'm gonna get, let's just put this in a general context for a second. Let's say that I give you a choice. I can either hand you $750 right now or you could have an 80% chance of winning a thousand. What would you do? You'd take the 750, right? Because that's the sure thing. Who would do that? Pretty much everybody in the room would take the sure thing, right? You don't wanna gamble, you know, and maybe come away with nothing. So in that sense, you're a conservative decision maker. We would call you risk averse. You don't like to take risks, okay? Now let's change the circumstances a little bit and change it from a game to potentially losing something. So I wanna say now, you can either lose $750 right now. I'm gonna just take it out of your wallet or you'd have a 60% chance that you'll lose a thousand. What would you, what would somebody, what would you do in the second row here? You'd take the loss of the 70, what if I change the odds? What if there was only a 50% chance you'd lose a thousand? You're gonna go with the sure loss, really. Who disagrees? Who would take the 50% chance of a loss? Quite a few people would. Most people would take that chance, especially if the odds go down, you know, that you'd lose anything. Because after all, there's a 50% chance you won't lose anything. And then you can take that money and go buy an expensive airplane part here at Sun & Fun. So the fact is, when people stand to gain something, they typically don't take risks. But when they stand to lose something, people might take a risk. So let's apply this back to aviation. If you look at a decision to divert as a loss, in other words, if you look at a decision to divert as, oh, geez, I gotta get a hotel room or get a rental car. We're gonna miss school, miss work. I'm gonna miss out on this business deal. If you look at it as a loss, what are you gonna do? Chances are you're gonna start talking yourself into continuing, right? Whereas, let's change the dynamic of how we think about this. If you look at a decision to turn around or divert as a gain, in other words, by diverting, you land safely and you only stand a chance of making it to your destination. If you look at it that way, you're much more likely to make that decision to divert. And so when you're making this decision, you can't view the decision to divert in terms of anything else that's going on in your life. You gotta just make the decision based on what's safest right now for you in the airplane. But make no illusions about it. This is, of course, a very difficult process and I don't wanna be flippant about it. The next thing we have is something called entrapment bias. Now, entrapment bias is where you have so much invested in a given course of action that to turn around or do something differently would be a huge waste. Now, how many folks here have driven their car around with the gas gauge needle on E? A few people, and those of you that don't have your hands raised, I know you're lying, because pretty much everybody's done it. And that's a case of entrapment bias. You're so focused on trying to get to where you're going and you're just hoping and praying that you will have enough gas to make it. Whereas chances are you probably passed the gas station somewhere behind you, but you're so focused on going forward that you don't think about what's behind you. And as human beings, we're all forward-looking people. You know, we don't like to think about what's behind us, we're focused on getting somewhere. And so that's why that decision to turn around or divert is so difficult, because once it's behind us, it's in the past. We don't think about it anymore. And so this becomes more and more difficult, especially as you get towards your destination, right? You know, you've gotten 90% of the way home. What's getting that last 10%, you know? And think of it, how many people have a GPS somewhere in their airplane? Pretty much everybody nowadays. What's the biggest numbers on your GPS? Well, it's either the time or the distance counting down to your destination and big, bold numbers. And as that, you know, now you're 100 miles away from home. Now you're 75 miles away from home. Now you're 50 miles away from home. And it just becomes stronger and stronger pull to make it all the way. And to divert when you're only 50 miles away from home, you know, that can be quite aggravating. But the problem is, what if it's just so bad that you just cannot make it that last 50 miles? You have to be able to put yourself in the position where you can make that decision. So that's entrapment bias. The next we have is inadequate gathering of weather information prior to the flight. Believe it or not, a lot of these accidents happen because pilots just took things for granted or they looked outside, the weather looked fine and they decided to make a trip, especially if it's a trip that's over a familiar ground. Now I'm very guilty of this as much as anybody else. I made a flight one time from Southern Illinois up to Central Illinois. It was a route that I'd traveled many times. I was flying an instrument equipped twin by myself. I was IFR, although I didn't really do a very good job of checking the weather, because it was one of those days where there was absolutely not a cloud in the sky. 72 degrees, brilliant blue sky, clouds nowhere. It was just a great day to fly, right? Well, I take off and I'm flying along and I start to see some puffy little cumulus clouds below me. I'm at 7,000 feet. I'm thinking, oh well, I'll just have to descend down through those and I'll get cleared for a visual approach. Well, I get about 40 miles away from my destination and I hadn't checked the ATIS yet called Approach Control. Approach Control said, Springfield weather is 200 feet overcast, visibility one half mile and fog expect the ILS 3-1. Well, needless to say I was quite surprised at this because it was one of these situations where it was just absolutely beautiful only about 150 miles away. But the thing is, even if it's a trip that you're on a familiar route of flight and even if it looks beautiful, you should still have a general idea of what the weather picture is like. And the problem is people take things for granted and a lot of these accidents happen because they haven't done a very good job of checking the weather. And the last thing, we already talked about the fact that there's an elevated risk at night that we can see from the statistics. How many, what percentage of general aviation flight operations do you think happen at night? 10%. Yeah, 10% of GA flying happens at night, very small percentage. However, it's 30% of the accidents. So I mean, it's a elevated risk compared to how much activity there is. And lastly, eight out of the 10 states that have the most inadvertent IMC accidents are located in designated mountainous terrain. So mountainous terrain is also a factor here. But to sum it all up, I just call this something called the expectation of success. When you become a pilot, you start to put experience into your bag, right? And very few of these accidents happen to student pilots or people that have just gotten a private pilot certificate. And I'd like to think that the reason for that is because flight instructors do a pretty good job of protecting their students when they're coming out of the nest, so to speak. The flight instructor puts a pretty good control on that. But once you get out into the world and you start flying on your own, as you fly more and more, you're building more and more experience and you're becoming more and more confident in your own abilities. And so ultimately, you're gonna start to test those skills by flying in not perfect weather conditions. And so what I think pilots lead to is a situation where they are pressured to continue by their social external pressures. And they also feel a little overconfident in their ability to handle things. And so they expect to be successful, but ultimately, some of these pilots end up having an accident. Now also, we're talking about technology. This is also important to discuss because this is the future for general aviation aircraft. There have been two recent crashes of advanced Cirrus airplanes. And with a plane with a big artificial horizon picture and a big TV screen, you'd wonder, how could you become disoriented in this plane? Well, one of these was operated under VFR conditions and the other was IFR. And spatial disorientation was suspected in both cases. What I wanna ask is, are we perhaps over relying on technology? Is technology developing to the point where pilots are becoming so comfortable with all the safety things in their airplane that they don't do a good job of just exercising good solid pilot judgment decision-making? And are we perhaps failing these pilots by just training them on all the technology and not really doing very much effort into solid decision-making skills, especially for inexperienced pilots? So we've covered a little bit of the psychological things that are going on or why these accidents happen. But let's just get down to the bare bones of it here. These accidents happen, these pilots crash because they become disoriented. So we're talking about spatial disorientation. Now, spatial orientation is your body's ability to detect its position in space, okay? But here's the important point. Your body is a VFR craft, okay? Your body is not genetically built to go flying. And it's only through technology in the past 100 some years that we've been able to take planes into the sky and do all sorts of things that our bodies were never really designed to. Now, am I saying this is unsafe? No, I'm just saying fundamentally, biologically, your body doesn't know what flying is all about. And so your body can go through some confusing feelings. Now, your ability to stay balanced and upright in space is comprised of three things. And the first is the visual component, okay? The second is what we call the vestibular component. And that comes from your inner ear. And we'll talk about that in a second. The last is what we call the proprioceptive input. And that is what is known as the seat of the pants. Okay, it's the sensations from your muscles and your otolith organs and everything that tell where gravity is and accelerations are. And so these things, excuse me, these three things integrated form your sense of whether you're upright or upside down or in a turn. Now, talking about the vestibular sense, this is a close-up diagram of your inner ear. And there's three of what we call the semicircular canals here. Now, this picture does a very good job of illustrating exactly how these canals are oriented so that you determine inputs in pitch, yaw, and roll and how your body, how these organs are oriented. Now, this is an amplification of one of those semicircular canals. And if you haven't seen this before, basically it's filled with a substance called endolymph, which is sort of a viscous fluid. And then you have this structure called the cupula, which has all these very fine hair cells in it. And the way the hair cells are attached, they're free to flow. And it's kind of like seaweed underwater, just flowing back and forth with waves or maybe wind blowing over a wheat field, how the wind just kind of flows like this. It's free to move. So the fluid moves back and forth. And if the hair's tilt, it's converted into a nervous impulse and sent to your brain, which is interpreted as movement or an angular acceleration. So the problem is, is that this structure is not exactly the best way of determining motion because of several factors. First of all, there's what we call an acceleration threshold. So if the movement is about less than two degrees per second of movement, there's inertia in there and the fluid doesn't move. So therefore the hairs don't move and you don't tell that you're turning. So it's very easy, if you were to try this in an airplane, but just by closing your eyes, it's very easy to roll into a very gentle bank, less than two degrees per second of roll, your body thinks it's still upright. How many people have heard of the leans? This is the sensation that comes from that because what happens is, you roll into a turn gently, you don't think you've rolled into a turn. Well, now if you roll out of it quickly, you roll back to level flight. However, the fluid moves and it's interpreted as a bank to the left, even though you're still upright. So now you're gonna be influenced to bank the airplane back to the right now. So there's a disconnect between what your inner ear's telling you and what you see out in front of you. The second problem is, if the acceleration becomes constant, over time, the fluid is no longer accelerated inside the canal, it slows down due to friction and it ultimately stops. So you could be in a prolonged constant rate turn and not think you're turning. Even if you rolled in quickly, initially you'd feel the roll into the turn, now you're just turning, no change to the roll rate, and now your body doesn't think it's turning anymore. So there's some issues here with the semi-circular canals. 90% of your spatial orientation is derived through the visual input, okay? And if you don't believe me, what you could try is, you stand next to a wall, put your hand on the wall, then raise a leg, close your eyes and take your hand down. See how long you can stand on one leg with your eyes closed. Chances are it won't be that long because you've removed 90% of your body's ability to tell whether it's upright and balanced. And that inner ear is not good enough to keep you balanced for a prolonged period of time. And so the other problem is the sensations from your inner ear are so strong that they are hardwired to your brain. And no matter what your conscious mind may be thinking, that inner ear has a direct pipe to your brain through the subconscious and you might consciously know the plane is level, but your body, everything in your body is screaming and turning. Now another thing that might illustrate this to you, there's like a little kid's game that people play at parties sometimes where you take a baseball bat and you stand the baseball bat up and then you put your forehead on the bat and you turn around the bat a bunch of times and maybe 30 seconds and then you try to walk straight down like a baseline from home plate to first base and you stand up and you try to walk straight and you just fall over almost instantly. And the reason that happens, even though you know the world is flat, the ground is flat and you're trying to walk upright, your body, the fluid in your inner ear still thinks you're in a turn and so your body is gonna try to turn with it. Even though you're consciously trying to walk straight, no matter how much effort you put into it, your inner ear is so powerful. And so this leads me to my second point. A lot of people think that the whole point of instrument training and everything is to overcome the sensations that they get from their inner ear. This is incorrect. Your body is hardwired from your inner ear to your brain. You can never override those sensations. You will always have those very strong impulses. So the objective of instrument training is not to overcome disorienting sensations, it's to acknowledge that they exist and then try to fight them and use the instruments as your replacement. No amount of training or practice can ever allow you to fly an airplane upright without some sort of visual information. You just cannot do it. So what are our choices here? We know that the inner ear doesn't give us complete information about flying the airplane. We need some sort of visual input. We need some sort of horizon information to tell whether the airplane is upright. So choice one would be, stay out of any weather conditions where you would ever not have a visible horizon. Now how practical a solution is that? Not practical at all. I mean, we'd never fly hardly. And so what is the better alternative but to instead learn to use the flight instruments as a substitute for the horizon outside the airplane? You've got a perfectly good attitude indicator right in front of you that gives you all the information you need that you could tell by looking outside the airplane. Now here's why these accidents happen. The pilot, instead of paying attention to the instruments or instead of transitioning to the instruments, what is he doing? Well, he's looking outside the airplane, trying to figure out where the ground is, trying to look outside like this. Even, you know, he's just floating in the cloud, he's searching, trying to descend the airplane, get out of the cloud. Well, he's got his hands locked on the yoke, but he's maneuvering the airplane without any reference to a good visual horizon. And so it can become really easy, especially if you try to make a turn now, to become disoriented and maneuver the plane inappropriately. And so the key is to learn how to use those flight instruments and be comfortable using them. Now here's kind of the most important part of this seminar and we're gonna start talking about stress here in a second. But this is an audio recording of something that happened on April 26, 03. This gentleman was flying a 172. He had between about 350 and 400 hours. And he was flying VFR from West Osh, Wisconsin to St. Joseph, Missouri. Now this gentleman is an engineer, very sharp guy, perfectly normal guy. And I wanna stress this point. He could be sitting in this room right now and you would have no clue because he is just as normal pilot as you or the next guy. And so he's a private pilot, no instrument rating, very good training, and he used the airplane not just for pleasure but he also used it for business. And the purpose of this flight was to go down to St. Joe to go see an auction. So I mean there was an objective to the flight and what happened was he was flying along and he got to about Fairfield, Iowa which is maybe about a little less, a little more than about a third of the way there. And the weather wasn't quite looking so good. Now it wasn't a perfect day to fly. There were some clouds there in the medium altitudes, four or 6,000 feet area, maybe a little lower than that. And he was flying VFR underneath those. Well, he's getting along, the weather's not looking so good ahead of him so he lands at Fairfield, calls flight service, they tell him what's up. They said, if you wait a little bit, chances are things will improve. So he waited a little bit and he thought it looked like it was improving so he started flying along. Well, here's where we pick up the recording. I need one, five, Lema, would I dare you to go ahead? I need one, five, Lema, say last known position. I need one, five, Lema, say altitude. Dodge, release the stick, go forward on the stick and then slowly back again. I need one, five, Lema, remain 7700, you have a transponder. You get level now. I need one, five, Lema, do you have a transponder, sir? I do, one, two, zero, zero. One, five, Lema, please trans out Squawk 7700. Lema, try to remain straight and you are in IFR conditions. Do your best to keep going straight and level and flying straight and level. We're gonna try to get you in contact with Air Traffic Control Center. Thank you, sir, I'm at 3,000. Okay, November, 9 or 815 Lema, are you able to switch frequencies? 9 or 815 Lema, contact Chicago Center, 118.15, 118.15, if you do not establish communications, come back to us immediately on this frequency. 118.15. November, 15, Lema, Roger. Put your hands up. Pretty scary, huh? There are a couple of things I want you to get out of this recording. The gentleman was able to land safely and he was ultimately vectored to Ames, Iowa and was able to land just fine, probably changed his shorts and he was actually able to finish his trip later that day. Now, there are a few things I want you to get from that. First of all, what could you tell about that pilot in the beginning of the recording? I mean, that is the sound of a pilot that is in the absolute throes of panic and that is the sound of a pilot who, if he didn't pull it together, was gonna die. I mean, I would never play a recording of somebody dying in a situation like this but it had a good outcome but he very well could have lost it. Now, what did you notice about the last half of the recording about his demeanor and his tone? He calmed down, right? What do you think it was that allowed him to calm down, right? And what do you think allowed him to do that? I'm sorry? Well, on an internal level, do you think it was his training, perhaps, that allowed him to recover the airplane? The solution to this is training. The way to get through stressful situations is training. So this is gonna be the focus of the next half of the presentation. But the thing I wanna stress to you is, like I said, this guy is a perfectly normal pilot. He's since gone on to get his instrument and commercial and multi-engine ratings and he's still flying but this guy is a perfectly normal pilot. He's as normal as you or I and so if this could happen to this guy, it could happen to you too. No matter how safe a pilot we think we are, as we've seen from the psychological things, we can always talk ourself into making a bad decision. And so when we're flight planning, here's our opportunities to counteract these situations. Now, of course, this probably comes as no surprise but weather accidents almost always occur on cross-country trips. And more often than not, they occur on the last portion of a cross-country trip where someone's trying to get home. You know, we'd talk about get-home-itis or get-there-itis. Now in many cases, such as the one that we just heard, the pilot stops, in fact, stops short of his destination to check weather or something like that. And then when he's on the ground, he starts checking the weather and then he thinks about all the stuff that's waiting for him as his destination and then he leads himself to make that decision to continue on. I can't tell you how many times this happens. You know, a pilot lands and, you know, pilot might land and the guy at the FBO might say, gee, you know, it's looking pretty bad out there. You know, we're happy to lend you the crew car. You can go to spend the night at a hotel. And then the pilot's response will be, oh, I don't think it's that bad. You're all go take a look, you know, and then he ends up having an accident. So a lot of times there's that missed opportunity to intervene in the accident chain. And another thing is, how many pilots get in their planes thinking that they're not gonna make it to their destination, right? Nobody gets in their plane and thinks, oh, there's a good chance I might not make it. You know, pretty much everybody's focused. Like I said, we're all forward-thinking people. We're always wanting to get to our destination, right? Now, when you do your private pilot training and you plot that course line out and everything, what's one of the required tasks in the private pilot PTS, a diversion, right? Well, the FAA did not just throw that in there to be spiteful. They threw the diversion task in there because they thought that it would be good, you know, good to actually teach pilots why this is necessary. The problem is, is probably not all instructors are doing a very good job of explaining why this is such a useful skill. And, you know, so you're flying along and you're so focused on your destination and you're direct to your destination, you may not even really be paying attention to where you are or where you're flying. You're just focused on getting there. And so if you run into a bad situation, a lot of these pilots are caught with their pants down with no plan B. And so the idea is, how much effort does it take to figure out a plan B before you take off? It's really not that hard. I don't think that there's no copies out on the back there, but not this month's issue of the FAA aviation news, but the last issue, there was a very good article called The Tale of Two Diversions. And it was describing a very hypothetical situation. And it was an amusing story because you had two pilots, identical planes, man and woman, they both have to divert. Well, the woman diverts to a fairly large metropolitan airport, rental car, that kind of stuff stays in a nice hotel, everything works out fine. Bob, our second guy, diverts to a very small, rural airport and there's the only rental car available is from like rent a wreck and it's radiators broken and there's no heat and it's like minus 20 out and he can only place he can find to stay is some flea bag motel with an all night bowling alley downstairs and there's no, doesn't get any sleep and he's all tired. So the lesson of the article, however, was that if you put some thought into diversions, you can actually make your trip go a lot smoother if you have to divert. Now, for instance, if you're playing a very long trip, how might you plan your route? Rather than just drawing that direct line from departure to destination, why don't you draw that line to include some larger municipal airports along the way where you know there's gonna be rental car available if you need one or a hotel or something like that or you could even plan your route to go by a major city so that if you had to divert, you could hop on the airlines if you really had to get to your destination right away. You know, there's that old saw that says time to spare, go by air, you know and general aviation flying for good or bad, we cannot rely on always getting to our destination when we expect to get to our destination. And so the idea is you need to be able to plan to have something available to you and think about something if you can't make it to your destination. When you're flying, constantly evaluate your conditions and also develop a set of personal minimums for yourself. This is a term that's popular now, personal minimums. FAA and AOPA have some good guidelines on how to establish personal minimums but the idea is personal minimums are what is the lowest ceiling visibility that I feel safe flying in? And then if the conditions don't match your personal minimums, you don't fly. The idea is is you set your personal minimums and then you don't bust them and that's what's gonna keep, one of the things that's gonna keep you safe. Also keep in mind the fact that making a no-go decision is a lot easier when you're on the ground than it is once you're already in the air and on your way to your destination. And another thing about, and I understand this completely, you're getting the air and maybe you didn't think about where to divert. Okay, the weather's bad. Well now you're diverting to Boonville Municipal Airport and there actually is a town called Boonville. It's on I-70, East of Kansas City, I've been there and it's one of these towns where I spent the night in a hotel and I called for a pizza and a pizza delivery lady came, I was on the third floor and she comes to the door of the hotel room, she says, that's the first time I've been in an elevator my whole life. So I'm thinking to myself, okay, I guess I've walked onto the set of deliverance or something, but I mean it was, you know, I understand, you don't wanna be stuck in Boonville, Missouri, you wanna be home, right? And so I understand you've got these pressures there, but you understand you're so locked in on your destination that everything else becomes so easy to trivialize all those other safety issues. And lastly, because we know that we don't do a very good job of estimating weather conditions, how do you know when the conditions are so bad that you've gotta turn around? This is a question, sort of a hypothetical question you have to figure out the answer to for yourself. Now, here again is an example of where committing to something and seeing it through leads to further complications. As you can see down here, there's some poor guy, I don't think this is the guy, but some poor guy drove his car off of the cliff there and into the water. And okay, they've got a crane here, no problem. All right, so they got the car in the sling, they're lifting the car up, everything looks good, and then the crane flips over. Okay, small problem becomes a larger problem. So what's the solution? Get a bigger crane. Okay, so here comes the car now, and now we're gonna lift the crane out. So, now we're gonna talk about importance of knowing your terrain. This is the famous last words here we've seen this cartoon quite a million times. But we're gonna take a look here at this sectional. How many people know what this element is here? Yeah, typically, I hear the same answers from everybody, but the technical term for it is the maximum elevation figure. And this is determined for the quadrangle, that on the sectional map, and the quadrangle is formed by the four lines of latitude and longitude with the tick marks here. Now you can see I can tell you that the highest obstacle on this sectional here is 1997 MSL, this TV tower just south of the Illinois River here. 1368 ADL. Now what they do is they take this figure, they put a little fudge factor on top of it, and then that's how we arrive at 2,100 feet. Now let's say you were flying through this area. Now how many of us know our exact position on the ground within a nautical mile? It's very difficult to do, because you might have drawn a line from the center of your departure airport to the center of your destination airport, right? Well you're not actually flying on that line, you take off, you fly a nice wide turn out from the pattern, you get established on course, then you hit direct enter on your GPS, right? Well you're not flying on that line from one airport to the other, you're flying on some practically new line here. So the thing is you may not know exactly where you are on the ground within a mile or so of what you thought you were gonna be on. So if you're flying along on some just random GPS line here, do you really know whether you're gonna fly next to this tower, over the tower, a couple miles away from the tower? Not really, unless you have a nice fancy GPS like a Garmin 396 with the obstacle database and all that kind of stuff. I mean that's nice to have in everything, but the thing is if your GPS directs somewhere, you just really don't know whether you're gonna hit this tower or not. So if the clouds are 2,500 feet and you're starting to dip down closer to 2,100 feet, couldn't this be a good idea of when it might be a good idea to turn around? So the importance of knowing terrain is very important. Now we're gonna talk about stress here. When you become in a stressful situation, you go through four phases. First is denial. Weather can't be this bad. Next you go through a period of confusion or inactivity. Okay, there's no emergency checklist for flight in IMC is there. I mean, so you're thinking, okay, what do I do now? Where am I gonna go? I didn't really have a decision to divert. I'm not really sure what to do now. Next you're gonna go through a phase of anger. Anger maybe at yourself. Anger at your passengers for pressuring you to get home. Anger at flight service for not telling you though the weather was gonna be this bad. And then lastly, you go through challenge. And challenge is, okay, I got myself into the situation. Now I gotta get myself out of it. And the trick is to get yourself from denial to challenge right away. There are pilots that hit the ground while they're still in denial. And so challenge is what's gonna let you get through the situation. It's what's gonna get you, what this pilot that we heard got himself out. Now talking about stress and performance, everybody performs better under a small amount of stress. If I give you a very boring task like sitting at a table in a blank room and hitting, there's a light bulb and a button. And whenever the light bulb turns on, you hit the button. Well, if that goes on for a couple hours, you're gonna start to get bored, maybe daydream, maybe fall asleep and you're not gonna do it. So if I introduce a little stress by calling my friend Guido to come and slap you on the face every time you don't hit the button, you're gonna start to hit the button when the light comes on, right? Well, if I up the stress some more, now I just tell Guido to just slap you all the time regardless of whether you hit the button or not, now your performance is obviously gonna deteriorate. So this is what we call being task saturated. Now we're gonna compare simple and complex task, a complex task or an emergency. You can see with the increasing amount of stress, it becomes, it takes a lot less time to become task saturated or overwhelmed than it does with a simple or routine task. So this doesn't have to be a lot of stress for you to become saturated. So when you're handling stress, this is the Air Force's philosophy and I'll just explain it briefly. When the Air Force does pilot training, they have a thing called standup, okay? They get all the cadets in the room, they get all the instructors, everybody in the room, and they pick a cadet at random. So it's a very stressful situation because he's gotta stand up in front of all of his peers and they give him an emergency situation and he's gotta recite the bold face emergency procedures to deal with it. But before he can even say anything, he's gotta say, I will maintain aircraft control, analyze the situation, take appropriate action and land as soon as conditions permit, right? Put this another way, you get aviate, navigate, communicate, right? So the point is maintaining control in an emergency instrument condition is as much a matter of your mind as it is of your skill. We saw from that guy that if you panic and you get overstressed, you won't be able to recover the airplane no matter how good of a pilot you are. I don't know if you heard that, they said it could be miles off course and he said that's impossible, they're on instruments. This is not instrument flying, folks. Just briefly about basic instrument skills, the U of I did a study very long time ago back in the 40s or 50s where they took pilots that had no instrument training at all, just brand new student pilots, they put them in a simulator and they said, you've gotta fly the airplane, no visual input. So in other words, without that 90% of our visual input, how long can you fly an airplane upright? Well, they figured that the mean was 178 seconds or just about three minutes. That's how long you can fly a plane in the clouds with no training. And so the minimum was like 20 seconds. I don't know what happened to that guy, he must have just like completely flipped inverted as soon as he got in the thing and crashed. And the max was something like 600 seconds. But it's not a long period of time. The first thing that you have to do is learn to let go of the controls. Avoid that grab and grip reflex. When you get in a stressful situation, what's your first instinct? Your fist, you know, ball up, you get stressed. You know, it's a very primal instinct, you know, the fight or flight response. You get a shot of adrenaline, you know, and you get stressed out. Well, as any flight instructor will tell you, what happens when you white-knuckle the yoke? You can no longer feel pressures on the palm of your hand anymore when you're white-knuckled on the yoke. And the key to instrument flying is not to manhandle the yoke around, but it's flying, I like to say instrument flying is about pressures, it's not about inputs. And the general order that you can fly an airplane, the less risk there is of you making control input that allows you to become disoriented and lose control. So the first thing you have to do is avoid that grab and grip reflection. You just gotta get your hands off the yoke. Because if you're flying the airplane looking out like this and you're all stressed out and you don't know what's going on and you gotta find a way to get down, it's not a good idea for you to be flying the plane like this. So if you take your hands off the yoke, is the plane gonna flip inverted out of control? No. I mean, airplanes have inherent stability. So if you take your hands off the yoke for a few seconds to get a hold of yourself, nothing bad is gonna happen. And then you can re-approach the yoke, calmed down a little bit and fly the airplane the way it needs to be flown. Make your attitude changes smooth and small and then relax and don't try to do too much. You just gotta get yourself slowly out of the situation. We're gonna talk about the five C's. The five C's are climb, communicate, confess, comply, and conserve. These apply to any emergency. It doesn't have to just be an inadvertent IMC. Now, climb, that might seem a little paradoxical. Why would you wanna climb if maybe descending would put you out of the clouds? Well, no one has ever collided with the sky. But a lot of people have collided with trees and buildings and things that live on the ground, right? So the higher you can get, the less chance you are of hitting something, right? What else does climbing get you? Well, if you're scud running at 1,500 feet and you try to call for help, what kind of range do you have on your radio? Not very far. But if you go up to 3,000 or 5,000 feet, chances are if you call for help, there's somebody that's gonna be able to answer you. So the idea of climb helps. You can save fuel, you can pull your power back, confess your situation to the ATC, comply with what they tell you and also lean your mixture if you need to to conserve fuel. Now, kind of a final point. Under periods of high stress, we do not rise to the occasion. We sink to the level of our proficiency, okay? So if you think that you're gonna get in a situation like this and your skills are just gonna come booming back to you and you're gonna be able to intuitively fly the airplane, you're wrong. You're only as good as your training. And so the importance of training cannot be overemphasized. And in fact, we can see that over time, you become a lot more confident about your abilities than your abilities actually are. So if you get in a plane and this happens, chances are additional training is probably warranted. Now, I'm gonna just briefly make this point about hazardous training. I know I have to wrap up, but when you do your training, you have to train to avoid instrument conditions not to handle instrument conditions. There is a distinction here. NASA did a study with new private pilots where they asked the private pilots, they said, what did you get from your hood training with your instructor? And the problem is 21% of the pilots said that now that they've had hood training, they'd feel more confident in their abilities to handle the plane in the clouds and they'd feel more comfortable about flying in the clouds. This is the exact wrong thing that we wanted them to learn. Instead, well, 68% had the correct response and they said that they would feel more confident in their abilities, but not more comfortable about flying in the clouds. So that's the key of training. We, you don't wanna train people to be scared straight about flying in the clouds. It's not the objective. We want them to be able to rescue themselves. Now, what can you do starting today? Participate in the wings program, of course. If you follow the wings advisory circular right now, I know it's gonna be revised, but it recommends an hour of hood training. Seek out some periodic hood training or training in marginal weather conditions. Pursue an instrument rating if you like. And if you're instrument rated, keep current. That's probably the most important thing. Now, final thoughts. Obtain weather from all available sources prior to the flight, even if it's a trip that you're very familiar with. Know the tools that you can use to update your weather information in flight once you're in the air. Establish some solid personal minimums for yourself and don't bust them. Learn to interpret in-flight weather cues and deteriorating visibility and lastly, separate the mission from the goal. If the mission is flying safely, the goal is getting to your destination. So, if you want more information on the subject, there's some very good publications. IFR for VFR pilots. FAA safety publications. There's also some publications from Cami. And I'd like to thank you very much for coming today and really appreciate your commitment to aviation safety. Thank you.