Flying into a cloud is a big risk? They're everywhere!
In fact, unexpected clouds are among the top killers in general aviation with a fatality (!) rate of 86% - if you lose visual, you got 180 seconds to live on average [1].
Stay the fuck away from clouds, fog and other visual obstacles with anything that moves, no matter if it's a drone, a plane, a ship or a road vehicle, unless you are trained and certified in instrumental operation. You will either hit something you didn't intend to yourself, or you will get hit by something that could have avoided you, had your vehicle had collision avoidance systems (in aircraft, TCAS, in watercraft ordinary radar plus AIS - neither of which are a requirement in small vehicles).
[1] https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2022/june/pilot...
Holy shit, why!? Are these planes crashing into the ground? It seems to me (an ignorant layman) that you would exit the clouds and have some time to regain control.
I have no doubt that the planes are crashing, given the fatality rate, but why is it so unavoidable that they crash after entering clouds?
Edit: found a little on the link referenced: " often ends in an unrecoverable graveyard spiral or spin"...I guess I just didn't realize that there are unrecoverable situations (given enough altitude). I'm going to blame Hollywood.
People end up trusting their body reflexes that have evolved for very different situation and absolutely lie to you. When an airplane turns, the actual G forces upon your body are very different than, for example, in a car. So the body feeling we have that we are turning or going straight in a car, misleads us when we are flying.
When you learn to fly, typically instructor will have a lesson where they obscure your sight (usually something called a "hood"), and let you fly by the seat of your pants for a minute or two. Typically, after a little while, when asked, student will be certain they are flying straight and level. Instructor will then remove the hood and demonstrate they are e.g. in a steep turning dive - something that would result in collision if allowed to continue.
Airplanes themselves do not crash after 180s (in fact, most small GA airplanes are designed to level themselves if left unattended). People crash them after a couple of minutes with sight obstructed :<.
(the Instrument Flight Rating is similar in USA & Canada as well, FWIW - you need to obtain that additional certification on top of your private license, to fly in clouds. Otherwise you are formally and legally constrained to VFR - Visual Flight Rules. There are extremely specific details on how close you are allowed to get to a cloud in every dimension, when you are and aren't allowed to fly, and what you must do if you cannot obey. These are drilled, tested, examined, and taken seriously)
Other times, you get your airplane in a situation / position where, when you do exit a cloud, you don't have enough altitude to correct it. Some airplanes have various types of spins you can enter that you cannot exit or cannot exit quickly. As well, people can remain very disoriented when they exit the cloud if they are in a spin, or they can panic and provide incorrect control input.
Think about cars - people can accidentally induce understeer or oversteer when they encounter unexpected lose surface, and unless they've had training and practice, they frequently will do the wrong thing even when they're aware of situation and problem. Similarly, people can exit the clouds in a stall or spin, and due to panic or incorrect thinking or inexperience or even lack of oxygen, they can continue producing incorrect input. For example, if you're in a simple stall and losing altitude - the absolutely correct thing to do is to point your stick/airplane DOWN, gain speed, and then regain control. But it takes practice and conviction to do that when you're close to ground and falling. Spin recovery can be more intricate (depending on the airplane), with stick, rudder, and throttle inputs that your primitive brain may not register are conducive to immediate goal of "don't hit ground". It's one thing to practice things 4,000ft in the air on a clear day with instructor with you; and another when you're 600 ft from the ground, your airplane is spinning, you can barely ascertain which direction it's spinning, the sound is overwhelming, passengers are screaming, and you're panicking :<
Even extremely qualified airline pilots have numerous times provided textbook incorrect control input in critical situations :(
As per my previous analogy - people without explicit driving instructions and practice (you must build actual reflexes, not just theoretical knowledge!), will overwhelmingly do the wrong thing when they understeer or oversteer a car - a machine they may operate daily otherwise and still have full sensory inputs. Flying in clouds / entering a spin is exponentially more complex and counterintuitive and punishing :<
If that still feels incredibly unlikely, and please take this in the kindest possible way as an illustration and not personal :), that's exactly what kills people! The profound and pervasive unawareness of how dangerous the situation is, and just how much your body senses will lie to you and how much following them will kill you.
(fwiw, note it's not "sum total of all people entering the clouds results in 86% fatality rate", of course - airlines go through clouds hundreds if not thousands of times around the world daily! But for untrained people to enter a cloud, especially inadvertently / unplanned, IS deadly)
Sometimes there are genuine issues with instruments. As well, note that most GA airplanes operate their crucial instruments and gyros via vacuum pump and they need to be re-calibrated after a while even in regular flight.
But I believe much more frequently, inexperienced humans distrust their instruments and trust their instincts/guts/feelings/body more. It's very very unnerving for inexperienced pilot to lost their sense of sight, ALL of their body is telling them they're turning and need to correct it, and some 1972 vacuum gyro is telling them they're going straight and don't touch anything.
Other times, things just accumulate, little drifts and changes and influences. Let's say that you're in cloud and trust your instruments, but after a while for whatever reason your VSI (Vertical Speed Indicator) is showing that you're descending 500ft/minute. What control inputs do you provide to correct that, without any visual references? There are right and wrong answers and integrating the basic six instruments, building correct mental picture of your position and angle and direction from these very limited and separate instruments, without visual reference, for long periods of time, is more tricky for untrained personnel than may be immediately obvious :-/
I was practicing increasingly denser fog/low visibility ILS landings of the F-16 in DCS, on my TrackIR'd 32"x3 triple screen sim rig (with transducers for buffeting sensations etc).
With triples (and much more so with VR, I'll transition to a Crystal "soon") you do develop a semi/meta(?)-"physical" connection with the sim after a while.
At a point visibility got so reduced I would completely experience vertigo. Even though I told myself it's only a sim, just look at the instruments (and the F-16 has so many, including HUD with the ILS glidescope), my head would spin out and I'd completely bork the landing.
Only after several more hours was I able to do it (with visibility so bad that the runway would only pop out when right on top of it metres from the ground). It would take a lot more to get comfortable with it, but by that point I had enough and - I still have nightmares about it. :)
Can completely understand how cloud based vertigo in a real plane with your life on the line has killed and will continue to kill so many. Mad respect to the real pilots here who have mastered this.
Most sim pilots can fly on instruments without a problem, because it's precisely the conflicting information between the instruments and your vestibular system that makes it easy to get disoriented. Flying a sim, you'll never have your ear telling you that you're leaning on your side even though you're flying straight and level, or vice versa, so you'll never be tempted to side with your vestibular system.
In a real plane, just turning a tight turn and suddenly looking down on the floor because you dropped something can induce conflicting vestibular information that's quite disconcerting even in day VFR.
Moreover, anybody who can fly a plane should intellectually know how to read an attitude indicator. But it takes a lot of training to be able to trust that indicator, when you have powerful sensory evidence that makes you instinctively feel the aircraft is doing something that it's not.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_illusions_in_aviation and note the long list of accidents at the bottom.
[Coriolis illusion] can produce an overpowering sensation that the aircraft is rolling, pitching, and yawing all at the same time, which can be compared with the sensation of rolling down a hillside.
Oh, wow, ok, that sounds strong indeed... I'm starting to understand it would be super hard, while vividly feeling like I'm rolling down a hillside, to try and tell myself: "oh, I just need to focus on the instruments, and trust them..."
It's hard to imagine just how strong the feelings are from our current position of at home and typing on phone or computer, but it really genuinely is your entire body completely convinced one thing is happening, while in fact something else is happening.
(Note this is part of the reason why even with full visibility so many people get nauseous - subconsciously what your body thinks is happening and what your eyes tell you is aftually happening, disagree - sometimes strongly)
Mind you that level flight through clouds only works if there are no buildings or mountains ahead, and keeping a straight flight path is even harder.
Once blind, your first prio is to keep the speed and vertical speed indicator constant. The problem is, without artificial horizont you cant really tell your bank angle, and your feelings just straight up lie to you. So you think you going straight, but suddenly your speed starts increasing. So you think "I am prolly nose diving a bit", and pull to compensate, only for speed to not decrease as much as youd like (or not at all), and suddenly you feel you are pulling 3g, and then you notice your altitude is dropping like crazy.
Thats how you get into diving spiral, and worst thing is you still have no idea if you are spiraling left or right. Keep it up for few more seconds and you can easily exceed safe speed, which given the g-forces is much lower than actual maximum speed in clean air. And a second or two later your first wing decides to go different direction than the rest of the plane.
I tested this with my instructor once, where we flew into a cloud just slightly above its bottom edge, with the goal of "try to fly trough it", only to find myself spinning out of the bottom with exactly this situation. We were prepared with brakes, lots of space beneath us and cleared general area of other planes, and checked beforehand theres no themral beneath to suck us higher, but that memory clearly showed how unintuitive and dangerous flying trough clouds often is.
And if the cloud ceiling underneath you is low enough, by the time you realize this, you may not have enough time or maneuverability to recover. Also, in some areas of the country, clouds have been known to conceal large mountains and cliff faces, which are uniformly fatal to airplanes.
That means most pilots around here live a lot longer than 180 seconds if they meet a cloud, the 2 big problems are mountains and landings (if the cloud base is very low), there is no good training for that except things like AirNav Pro on a tablet with the right maps and 3D view but that is a measure of last resort, not a training.
But in the end I fully agree that if you are not trained, stay away from clouds and fog. I am just pointing the difference between being trained and being licensed, in Romania you cannot get licensed for IFR on planes up to 600 kg, nor are you allowed to fly at night (other EU countries allows it).
Broad Points:
1. The study was done in 1954, not 1991. 2. The AI, DG and VSI were covered. 3. The subjects had received NO prior instrument training whatsoever, typical for private pilots of that time period. 4. The study was performed in a real airplane, a Bonanza. None of the students had ever flown a complex high-performance aircraft prior to the study.
Yes, flying IMC as a non IFR pilot is dangerous, but the video/study is misleading. I can't find the original source for 86% but I'd bet anything that a PPLs today would not die 86% of the time if they flew into IMC, I suspect they mean it was fatal in 86% of the cases where there was an incident.
What IS going to kill a VFR-only pilot is things like scud-running under a marginal ceiling trying to press an airport because "I swear it can't be that bad based on the last PIREP and I have to meet Mom/Dad/spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/buddies because X." Then they find out the ceiling IS that bad, they go inadvertent IMC, they freak out, and now we're off to the races. Maybe they wrap it up too tight trying to do a 180. Maybe they CFIT. Maybe they pop out again mid-turn and now they're lost AND freaked out.
One of the #1 rules of aviation is to KNOW YOUR LIMITS.
That said, as a lowly PPL, I think we PPLs should do foggle practice somewhat regularly especially if you intend to fly at night in a rural/coastal area. There've been a few CFITs into the ocean at a nearby airport because of non-instrument PPLs taking off out into the ocean with no references.
Of course there's also Special VFR but I doubt you'd get authorization for that in an Ultralight.
An example of someone who lived to tell the tale:
http://www.37000feet.com/report/879711/new-in-type-private-p...
It is certainly possible (and easy) to become disoriented in IMC.
But every private pilot has at least a couple of hours of simulated instrument time and should be capable of navigating their aircraft back out of a cloud.
You are taught, if you have a competent instructor, to ignore your senses and rely on the instruments in such situations, as well as recovery from unusual attitudes by instruments alone.
I don’t doubt that people forget their training or don’t keep current however.
Also, there is no such thing (for light aircraft) as an unrecoverable attitude that results in impacting the ground a minute and a half later.
Any properly loaded certificated light aircraft can be recovered from any attitude if you have that much time.
It takes a max of about 10 seconds to recover an aircraft from any unusual attitude and reestablish straight and level flight.
A spiral dive (the typical situation with loss of visual reference) it might take 15 seconds since you have to bleed off the speed you picked up.
There might be some extremely low drag aircraft that might be a bit more problematic in that regard, but they are typically also capable of much higher VNE limits.
Aircraft that are deemed incapable of entering a spin inside their operational envelope may be granted an exception. (Some stall resistant aircraft like the ercoupe or some canards, for example )
In practice, although many light aircraft are not certified for intentional spins, almost all of them are recoverable from a fully developed spin inside 1000 feet. YMMV with a large transport category aircraft however lol.
A fully developed spin is like a seed helicoptering to the ground. It is a stable condition, with a low and constant rate of descent. It used to be taught as standard practice for c150 pilots to use a flat (fully developed, stable) spin to descend through clouds into a known safe ceiling if a non instrument pilot found themselves trapped above a cloud layer with sufficient clear space below the layer to descend into.
Spins are not, generally, a boogie-man… but accidentally entering one during a steep turn near the ground is a really bad idea. I have more than one friend who has tried it , 0/10 would not recommend.
One possible exception is when you have floats attached. I’m not sure of the spin recoverability of a light plane with floats, never tried it, but I do know mounting floats on many aircraft effectively voids their intentional spin endorsement and sometimes requires the installation of additional vertical stabilisers on the empennage.
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to spin my old t-cart on floats with a kayak tucked under one wing and a pair of rifles strapped to the other. Don’t have to worry about VNE with that outfit though lol.
The problem is that in a spiral dive your butt feel is like you are going straight and level, but your airspeed and feel of the airplane is telling you to pull up.
It will appear that the artificial horizon has failed (it will usually be indicating the truth, but it will feel wrong and you will think it’s broken, or it may be past it’s gimbal lock limits. )
If you follow your instincts, you will try to pull up. That will have the effect of tightening the spiral component of the dive but will not cause the aircraft to regain level flight. It will also have the effect of drastically increasing the stress on the airframe, which may already be beyond its maximum structural speed.
Recovery from a spiral dive is very easy… but you have to know you are in a spiral dive, and without visual reference to the ground that requires awareness and correct interpretation of the flight instruments.
You are in a spiral dive if:
A: you are going at an inexplicably high speed for your engine and airframe configuration (you are in a dive). Most pilots recognise this easily.
And
B: your rate of turn indicator is off center or especially, pegged to one side. You have to be looking for this.
Aside from that, a rapid descent showing on the VSI and altimeter.
Other gyroscopic instruments such as the heading indicator and the artificial horizon may be showing erratic or incorrect information.
Recovery is easy:
1: immediately pull the throttle to idle.
2: neutralise the turn that is indicated on the turn indicator using normal control inputs. Do not attempt to pull up until the turn has stopped completely.
3: gently pull out of the dive. Avoid abrupt control movements until the aircraft is below manoeuvring speed.
4: continue to fly the aircraft. If you are in clouds consider carb heat to avoid icing.
That’s really it.
And yes, in theory properly loaded certified plane can be recovered in most of the cases. But it is not going to help you to know that recovery takes 10k feet if you are at 8k AGL.
If you are a pilot and do not take recurrent training or actively practice -in the aircraft you fly- on unusual conditions, you are actively in abdication of your responsibility as a pilot and should not be flying anything heavier than a part103 aircraft. There is a reason why even landing at night requires a 90day currency before you can land at night with a passenger. Being a pilot is not like riding a bicycle. It requires constant skill maintenance.
There is no situation you can get into where the aircraft is still intact where a recovery in a light aircraft will take more than about 1000 feet if properly executed. Perhaps in some aircraft as much as 2000 feet.
The only way I can imagine anything so extreme is that you are already at VNE pointed straight down and you have to slip the plane a little to slow down before you can pull significant Gs on the airframe. That might take a few seconds. But it also assumes you already have been in an unusual attitude for quite some time and chose not to recover until now.
> There is a reason why even landing at night requires a 90day currency...
With passengers. I don't like to fly at night in a single engine plane and I go months if not years between night (solo) landings. Granted I don't fly to unlighted runways, but in my experience landing at night on a lighted runway is not that harder than landing during the day.
> ... in a light aircraft will take more than about 1000 feet if properly executed. Perhaps in some aircraft as much as 2000 feet.
Many planes have been modified after the spin certification had been done. E.g. on my A36 I have tip tanks, radar, TN engine, anti-ice, ... I have no idea if it will recover from spin as expected or not. And I have no interest in testing it. I can tell you that I lose 500-600 feet in a stall. This gives me a hint that recovery from a spin might be more than 1000 feet.
I have only been in actual instrument conditions once with an instructor who was certified to do so under and instrument flight plan. It's disorienting. It's turbulent. Its impossible to avoid other planes (IFR the tower keeps you separated).
Crosswinds and rain and landing are basically boring after a few tens of hours. But fuck clouds.