Several times in my long flying career I have flown into weather I hadn’t planned on. The discomfort, and fear of each of these varied. The least intrusive was in a King Air 200 one night. The weather was described as marginal VFR. As always I was on an IFR flight plan, and the weather was well above the minimums prescribed for the route. I was hand flying the airplane because the airplane was quite old, and the altitude capture didn’t seem to work. On the descent I could see the airport out ahead, then suddenly couldn’t. We had flown into a drifting batch of clouds.
Without a thought I got on instruments, which, for the most part I was already referring to during the descent. I had completed a recurrent course about a month prior and flown a few hours on instruments in the past week or so, thus the transition was routine. I intercepted the ILS, flew the approach down to about 500 feet and landed. IIMC, certainly by definition, but uneventful because I was instrument trained and current, and I was in an aircraft that was well equipped for it.
The other end of the terror spectrum happened with a helicopter flight in the mountains of Arizona at three AM. Reporting in for a night shift I had noticed a high overcast on the drive, and it looked like there was weather building up around us. Once in the office, the weather on the pilot office computer showed a batch of rain was moving in from the Gulf of Mexico. That guaranteed the mountains later that night would be obscured. As we often did in those days I avoided talking to the nurses about weather. They only cared about getting to their patient. It was the pilot’s problem how to get them there.
About two AM we got a call for a trauma patient about eighty miles northeast of Phoenix. He was horribly injured from crashing his truck into a tree. We had the usual tense dialogue, the nurses pushing to go while I pointed out the weather and the potential danger. The compromise in those days was ‘Why don’t we try it. We can always turn back.’ The truth was, we never turned back, no matter how badly the weather deteriorated. Knowing I would soon be scud running across rising, dark terrain, we set off, the nurses chatting happily while I had visions of flying into the soggy clouds and trying to survive.
We made it to the LZ deep in a mountain forest and landed on a narrow country road. As we landed I could see the clouds were only a few hundred feet above us. And it was raining. I sat in the helicopter, thinking about the jam I had gotten us into. Sure enough, as we lifted off and climbed out of the trees the clouds were now almost down to the tops of the trees. I turned to our heading to Phoenix, then suddenly we were in the clouds. We couldn’t turn back. The ambulance had signed off the radio and left the LZ. I had to figure out how to stay right side up.
I took a few deep breaths and locked on to the little attitude indicator, then began a scan that was spotty and scattered. I hadn’t flown instruments in years. Our annual training and checkride was one hour flight time and included one ILS with a pair of foggles supposedly blocking the outside view. But they didn’t. Foggles are designed for airplanes where the view downward is nothing but airplane cabin. In a helicopter you had a clear view of the ground through the chin windows. It was a sham exercise designed to allow our employers to check a box on the training form.
But now I was stuck, either fly until we could got clear of clouds or ….
First thing I did was not move the cyclic. It’s current position had us in level flight. If I didn’t move it, theoretically we would remain in level flight. But we were being blown around by gusts of wind while rain pounded on the windshield. I corrected for the first lurch to the right, then back to center. We rolled off to the left and the nose drifted to the right, or so the heading and attitude indicators showed. I overcorrected, then remembered I needed to center the ball, or the helicopter would never fly right. A quick touch of the pedals brought the ball more or less to the center then I immediately returned to the attitude indicator, the airspeed indicator and the altimeter.
The next gyration from the turbulence showed up on the attitude indicator. I caressed in a touch of corrective roll and pitch. Miraculously it showed level, and the heading indicator quit turning I froze the cyclic movement right there. As the seconds rolled by I got better at it and the gyrations settled down to minor deviations.
The intercom was quiet. From my silence the nurses sensed we were in trouble and were watching my every move. I didn’t care. My whole life’s focus was on these 1940-vintage instruments, every second another challenge to stay right side up. But every second also took us closer to descending out of the clouds and escaping the mountains. We flew for about fifteen minutes. It seemed like an hour, but then we began to see the lights of Phoenix through the rain and mist. Then we flew out of the clouds. The city spread out across the horizon. No one said anything for a while, then the nurses got busy prepping their patient for his transfer to a gurney at the hospital ER helipad.
Later, when we were back at our base quarters I felt we needed to clear the air about our dangerous escapade. We managed it, vowing that none of us would ever be a part of pushing the weather to save a patient. Would they actually listen to the next pilot they faced weather with? Not likely. Their mind set was always to get to the patient.
The atmosphere in the air medical community today is much more supportive of logical decision making, everyone on the team dedicated to making safe choices. The accident rates show that practice is working. Still, pilots are too often faced with pushing highly unstable helicopters equipped with light airplane instruments into murky skies. Their training is much improved, employers now giving pilots basic instrument skills. And more and more helicopters are equipped with autopilots. These crews have at least a fighting chance out in dark skies in remote terrain where there is no weather reporting, giving the pilot the mental space and security to plan a route to safe skies.
As well there is a steady trend to transition to twin-engine helicopters with full avionic suites and pilots with a full set of instrument flying skills, like the rest of the world in aviation. IIMC will remain a constant threat until that transition is complete.