No sweat, friend. I figured either I wasn't clear and/or you misunderstood my point.
I know during my VFR training I did some work under the hood and learned enough that if I got into IMC to announce it to control and if possible do a 180 and try and get out the way you got in.
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Roger that.......but I, at the time, made a bit of a hobby out of that particular flight, since, as a flight instructor, he did so many things wrong, I wanted to make it into a teaching moment.......just to refresh everyones memory.
.....he was in a big hurry to reach his destination
.....he was flying with a cast on his foot from an injury (a BIG no-no)
.....his route of flight was up the center of Long Island Sound, and over the Atlantic to MV, over water all the way, in a single-engine Piper, when he could have flown up the coast, and never been more than a few miles from any one of hundreds of airports.
.....he attempted an approach toward the ocean, when ground fog was reported, when he could have just have easily approached from the opposite direction (which was the way he was coming from initially), so he actually had to circle the airport to land in that direction.
.....he embarked on a long straight-in approach, instead of keeping his pattern tight, the runway in sight at all times.
.....He was attempting a night landing, (carrying passengers) with only 2 hours of night flying in his logbook.
.....He was flying an aircraft that he had just purchased a few weeks earlier, and there was no record of him having any instruction in that particular aircraft.
.....He failed to file a flight plan, therefore it was many hours before anyone knew that his flight was missing.
So many really dumb mistakes.......
doc