Inadvertent IMC Accident Review PART 2 11-28-2017

And hey, we're live again. Kennywithelopterground.com I'm gonna turn down my volume here. We are trying something new. Brian Rutledge is here today. He is here from California. He's at home logged in from his laptop. So we're gonna do a little test here. So bear with us, viewers. Number one, can you see us? Can you hear us? And we're gonna try me talking, Brian talking and then going over to Gary's camera. This is a first time bringing somebody in from across the country. So bear with us as we go through. So I'm gonna roll up my volume here, Brian, and just real quick, Brian, say hello to everybody.

Hello, everybody. Brian Robbins from California. How's everybody doing? Awesome.

Now I'm going to go over to Gary's camera. If I do this correctly and. All right, give her a try, Gary.

All right, how's our audio? How's our video? We've got Juanita already logged in waiting for us here. Chris Hauser and Greg Atkinson. We have rero and Kevin McCombs, Rick Seay, Taz Chrisman. Hello, Taz. Mark Schmidt, Sioux Falls. Welcome, everybody.

Does anybody making any comments about audio and video?

I'm looking. Somebody tell me how can you hear us? How can you see us trying something new, bringing somebody in on remote?

Okay, while we're doing this, I'll give a little background.

Rick says Brian sounded good.

Nice.

Okay, good.

Awesome.

And that's working then.

All right, I'm gonna go back over to me and I just want to give you all a little background here on Brian and then I'll let you tell you whatever he wants to give you about himself. But Brian contacted me three, four years ago. He was working on his cfi. It's probably almost five years ago now. And Brian, I did a lot of stuff online in the beginning of helicopter online ground school, and we became friends and then Brian was just always kind of logging in and, you know, keeping track of ground school for me from the outside, looking in, giving me advice and, you know, just kind of like my sounding board. And then Brian's like, well, hey, you know, I brought Brian in to get involved. And he's been operations manager for about three years now is the title that we came up with for Brian. So I'm ex cop turned helicopter pilot. Gary's 24 year retired police officer turned helicopter pilot. Brian is still a police officer. He can tell you how many years he's been in law enforcement, but a long time turned helicopter pilot. So he's still active as a police officer. So we're all cops, ex cops, retired cops. Chris Hauser, that logged in, is one of our instructors you see from time to time. He's still a cop, too, so kind.

Of crazy how that all works.

Brian, talk here for a minute. Just share Brian with our viewers before we get started with the inadvertent IMC part two, just give a little background or whatever you want to share with everybody and tell them about what it is you're going to be teaching them today.

Sure, not a problem. Like you said. Brian Rutledge, I'm here in California. I do work for a local law enforcement agency. I've been with the department about 22 years. I've been in the air unit 13 years now. It's been a great career. I'm enjoying it. I got a few more to go and then I'll be retired like Gary. And the thing that I really want to impart to everybody is what you learned today or what you gleaned from today. Take it with a grain of salt. But go out there, do your research, and when it's all said and done, just make sure that you constantly are striving to become better each and every day. As a pilot, you never stop learning. You're always going to come across different ideas, different ways of doing things. Take all those tools and put them in the old toolbox and stay safe while you're out there flying.

Well, I gotta say that, you know, last week we did the review of that helicopter accident, R44, horrible, tragic event, four people fatal, you know, lost their lives. But we rolled that. It was the short version, but just shows you how people get out there, get close to their destination, get into the soup and bad things happen. And then I gave, you know, a bunch of my stories last week, just real world things that I got involved in in the past 15, 20 years of flying, especially in the professional environment. And the thing Brian and I talked on the phone the other night and no disrespect to somebody who may be new to this, but last week a couple people said, well, I would never do that. It's easy to be back on the ground saying, I would never go do that. But if you're new to flying and you're just getting into it, you wouldn't have experienced this yet. It's when you get out into the commercial environment and you get into the real world and you're operating for an operator who's more worried about cash flow and money and the blade spinning and then let yourself push Yourself. So I'm not going to say a whole lot today. Gary's going to take care of comments and I'm going to let Brian roll with this because this is Brian's presentation last week. I brought up a little bit of it, but we ran out of time because I was telling stories almost for the whole hour. So today's Brian's day. This is the first time Brian's ever been with us live. So we're excited to have him on here. Brian's a 30 year aviator. He's got tons of experience and you're going to learn a lot from Brian. So I'm going to just let Brian take over and.

Hey, Kenny, I think we got a few people not getting video. Probably people that followed the link from the email and Chris Howser says he was had to go straight to the YouTube channel to get it. There's another person. Max Helicopter finally made it. Had to go back through YouTube main page. So what's a link I can type into the comments here to send Everybody.

To.

The YouTube main page?

Jump on. Well, just whatever link on your view page, go to your view page on YouTube, grab that link that's on the top. Well, but if they're on YouTube, I don't know, I'm confused right now how to get them to the actual YouTube page. Because if they're in the chat, then they're on the YouTube. Grab the link at the top of the view page, put that in the chat. They're getting the chat somewhere. Maybe that will get them back to.

Where they want to be.

Just the home helicopter one?

Yeah.

And we'll see if that gets them in. Sorry about the confusion today, guys. We had this the first time that we've went again live across the country. We'd been asking for a couple months since we had this technology for any of our ground school members that wanted to like log in and try this with us and do some mock checkrides. And not one person has come forward and said, hey, I want to log in with you remotely on live training Tuesday or at any other time. So this morning we were trying different avenues on how to make this live work. And so we're still excited about what we're doing and we'll get better with time. So I'm gonna see what else Gary's got over there. Anything else?

Well, let's see here.

We got.

We got a lot of people watching.

That's good.

Well, tell you what, Rebecca from Orange.

County, California, Todd here. Greetings from dc awesome. Alan from South Africa.

We've.

They were strolling in while you were talking so I'm trying to go down through here. Chris, of course he's finally in. I had to go through the YouTube channel. I think I mentioned Greg Atkinson, Ellen.

Palmer.

Kevin McCombs mentioned him earlier. We've got a big crowd here. Sorry if I missed anybody.

It's alright.

We can always try to catch up with that later. We'll get back to Brian here. Get him.

Not a problem. You still hearing me okay, Kenny?

What's that? I'm sorry I had you turned down.

Oh, just. You're still hearing me okay? Yep. Okay, good.

All right, well Brian wants. Go ahead and get started and we'll see what comments come in and just start rolling telling. Give them some, some imc.

Not a problem. Not a problem. The big thing I want everybody to take away from this is that I don't want anybody to think this is the only way that you handle inadvertent imc. This is something I put together, I've collected information over the years. But the big thing that I really want to impart on everybody is don't get yourself into the position where you're going to have to use any of this. That's really, really important is avoidance. And so I always want to kind of start out by giving people a few stories. And I know stories can get a little boring at times if they're too long. But what I've done is I've gone on to the website AOPA and they have a database for accidents. And the first thing I'd like to do is I'd like to bring up one that's actually local to the California area and I'm going to pull it up real quick and I'm just going to read this and I want you guys to just take note of some of the things that the pilot did that got himself into trouble. This particular flight was to transport an injured sheriff's department canine dog. So you can tell already from the very beginning it's one of their partners canines that's been injured. It had been shot. And so the pilot really wanted to make sure that he could transport this dog. However, this flight was going to take place at about one o' clock in the morning. The pilot had discussed all the weather conditions and he had determined that it was EMC visual meteorological conditions or VFR flight is what he had planned on. However, he also was aware that there was a weather front that was moving through the area and that he likely would encounter IMC conditions or instrument Meteorological conditions while en route. He had made plans for that. However, he did encounter light rain, strong winds, low clouds and fog. He did not turn around. He continued, needless to say, once he went into instrument meteorological conditions, inadvertently, thus inadvertent imc, he descended, hopefully to try and find the ground. And he did find the ground. He actually hit the ground extremely hard, and it was a roadway that he had landed on. He just didn't know it was coming up as fast as it came up. He decided to go ahead and continue flying, got to an airport, landed and discovered that there had been substantial damage to the helicopter. Nobody was injured, nobody lost their lives. But it's just a real quick story on. Here's a law enforcement officer that did a weather briefing, knew there was bad weather coming in, got himself in trouble, and continued on. So I want everyone to understand, professional pilots make mistakes, new pilots will make mistakes. And the whole goal of this presentation is to hopefully keep you thinking and not allow yourself to get into those positions. So we'll jump real quick into the end of the PowerPoint on my screen, Kenny, just so you know, I just have slide number two. I know you went over this last week, but we're going to recap it real quick. So if you have that up on the screen, basically all it is is what is inadvertent imc. And that's when you inadvertently fly yourself from visual meteorological conditions into instrument meteorological conditions. The whole time you're planning on staying vfr, Where you're losing contact with the ground visually, you lose that horizon. Spatial disorientation can set in extremely quickly. We're going to talk just real quick about that in the next couple of slides. But if a person ever finds themselves in instrument meteorological conditions, it is one of the most demanding, disorienting and dangerous things that can happen because you weren't planning it. Moving on to the next slide, slide number three. I know we covered this last week, too, but there may be some new people that didn't catch it. But when you go on an IFR flight, you're planning on losing the horizon potentially if you're going to be flying into the clouds. But you make those plans, you know, ahead of time. You usually go in wings level. You're already adjusted on the instrumentation on your aircraft, and you're planning to lose that horizon. It's all preplanned. When it's in invert and imc, you have no plan to actually lose the horizon. It happens that quick. And when that happens, if you do not have some type of plan of action. The outcome typically is not very good. Moving on to slide number four. It's just talking about avoidance. We don't need to go through all these in grave detail. I think a lot of this stuff can be held for additional web programs. But you know, doing a good weather briefing first and foremost. First thing I do as a pilot every morning when I get up, I just look out the window, I just see what's out there. Is it a sunny day? Do I have a low overcast, Is it foggy? And then I have a couple apps. I just take a little peek on my, on my cell phone and I just look and see what the conditions are in the general area that I fly in just to get kind of an idea in the morning what the conditions are. As the day progresses I may look again a couple hours later and see if there's much of a change. But by the time I get to work, I'll sit down and I'll do a thorough briefing on the computer and I'll look and see what the conditions are forecasting. So you always got to do a really good weather briefing. Avoiding flight and marginal vfr, that's one of those things where you just have to have your personal minimums. And if your minimums are you're not going to go out and fly if the ceiling is less than 3,000ft and the visibility is less than say 6 miles, then if those conditions exist, don't go flying. That may not be marginal VFR at the time, but it can change. And I'll tell you, for new people out there that have not flown in marginal conditions or flown when visibility is right at minimums thousand foot ceiling, three miles visibility, you had better be prepared for what you're about to get yourself into. Because 3 miles visibility is not much. And just because they are forecasting three miles, you may get yourself up there and it may actually be 2 miles. So you really got to be careful. Kenny, do you want to say something? No. Worries, no worries at all. I'll continue on then. I always like to check whether ahead of my route, especially if I'm going somewhere far. If I'm working the local area as a law enforcement officer, I may stay within five miles of a towered airport, class Delta airport the entire time I'm flying. But there's times where we may have to venture out and there's no airports for the next 20 miles. So it behooves the pilot whether you're in law enforcement, EMS or just private, if you're going somewhere you need to be checking the weather ahead of your route and have those in route decision points when to turn around if weather starts to get bad. If you are constantly coming down in altitude, that's a problem. It's time to either land and shut it down and wait or turn around and head back to the airport or to the nearest airfield possible and land the aircraft. We'll move on to the next slide real quick. This is just knowing the weather. Slide number five. Gary, if you can hear me, you know this here, I just typed these up. I just kind of made them up. But if you look, if you, if you're brand new, you don't understand what you're looking at. These are metars and this is in the raw format. But what I want you to look at is where it says few 044. Okay, so they're saying that there's few clouds at 4400ft. Not a big deal. If you look at the next one, overcast, it shows overcast 055, which is 5,500ft. Then if you look at the next set of numbers, you've got 22, 13. That's your temperature, dew point. These are important things to look at. The temperature and dew point, they're quite a ways apart. They're about 9 degrees difference. And we've got high clouds at 5,500ft and we've got a few at 4,400ft. That's a great day to go flying. I don't see anything wrong with that. But then if you look down at the next one now we've got, we still have 10 miles visibility, but now we've got this scattered layer of clouds. And 006, for those of you that are new maybe not understand this. That's 600ft. That's pretty low. It is scattered. But if you look at the next one, overcast is 1400. That's not much better. And if you look at the temperature and dewpoint 17 and 16, now the temperature, dew point is getting close together. And for those that are new, again, if you don't understand what that means, the closer your temperature and dew point get, the more saturated air you have, the more chances of rain, low clouds, fog, obscured visibility. All those things happen with the moisture in the air and the temperature when they're really close like that dew point, temperature. If you look at the last one, it's showing three miles visibility now with light rain and mist. And you've got few clouds at 700ft, a broken layer at 1600 and an overcast layer at 2200 and your temperature dewpoints close together, 17 and 15. So taking these three different airports in my area and looking at that, I know that if I departed Sacramento with the conditions that they have, I have, I'm still VFR, but I've got few clouds floating around at 700. Why there's so much moisture in the air, temperature dew points close together, it's probably going to get worse, especially if there's a cold front coming through. So I take all that information together and I decide whether I'm going to go fly or not. This particular day, looking at light rain, Mist and Feud 700, I'm not flying, just not gonna do it. The boss isn't gonna question me. I'm just not gonna do it. I'm gonna wait for weather conditions to improve. So that's how I do it. Again, this is just a metar. I do that with the taps as well and I do a real thorough briefing. But before I make a decision to go fly. Next slide up is talking about spatial disorientation. For those of you that have never actually experienced spatial disorientation, I would urge you to, to find a qualified CFI who is instrument rated and that has some form of practice and being very current and proficient in taking people out and teaching you about spatial disorientation while you're in flight. That's what I do with our guys. Everybody should know if you're in any form of training or you've been flying for a while, that the inner ear is everything. And if you try and listen or react to what your inner ear is telling you on any given flight and you're not using either your visual references outside on a VFR flight or if you find yourself in instrument meteorological conditions, you're not using your instrumentation, spatial disorientation can take over. And when that takes over, typically it ends in a crash. So you really want to be aware of spatial disorientation and the importance of using your instrumentation if you find yourself in a position where you've lost the horizon. Anything you want to add, Kenny or G? No, you're doing great. Okay, sounds good. Sounds good. Okay, so with the spatial disorientation, just so that everybody understands, I really, I really want to impress this, impress upon the new people that maybe don't have a lot of flying experience, you know, those of you that have been flying for a while and understand this fully. You know, just try to try to bear with me on this real quick, but I'll try and cover this as fast as I can. You know, when we start talking about aviation physiology and spatial disorientation, your body uses these systems to determine your orientation in space and your movement in space. Your eyes by far are, Are the best source of information for you. Very obvious. I usually take new people and I'll just have them stand up, put their hands next to their side, close their eyes for just about five or ten seconds, and then tell them, lift one foot off the ground, just lift it up. And typically they wobble a little bit or they have to put the foot back down to gain their balance. Why is that happening? Because they can't see anything. They have no visual reference with their position in space. And so it makes it very difficult for people to stand there long term with their eyes closed. Or I'll have them walk through the office with their eyes closed. And they tend to slow way down. Why? Because they don't want to bump into anything. They can't see anything. But when your eyes are open, you can react normally. You see things, you have references. Kinesthesia is the sensation of position, movement, or tension perceived through your nerves and your muscles. It's kind of that flying by the seat of your pants, not something you want to do. Once you've lost your horizon. You do not want to pay attention to the kinesthesia portion of your. Of your body because nine times out of 10 is going to give you the wrong clues. And then the vestibular system, very sensitive. That's that inner ear. You've got the fluid in the earth. You've got these little hair cells that deflect away when you make a turn, turn your head, turn your body. When your eyes are open. It's not anything really that we pay much attention to. But when your eyes are closed or you're not looking at a visual horizon when you're flying, these senses will make you. Or you could find yourself paying attention to those senses because you'll feel like you're in a left turn. You will make an input on the cyclic for a right turn, when in actuality you were probably flying straight and level in the first place. And now you put yourself in a turn. So that's the vestibular system. Very, very dangerous if you pay attention to it. And that is how you get yourself into spatial disorientation. We'll skip ahead real quick to. I'm on slide number eight. This is just going to be talking about some illusions that happen. I take our guys out and I want them to experience just about every illusion that I can get them to experience while we're flying. And one of them is the Coriolis illusion. You know, if you, if you don't have a reference to the horizon and you make these abrupt head movements such as dropping a pin on the, on the floor, you reach down to pick it up, or you look down to change a frequency in your radio and again, we're talking, you're in imc. You can't see the outside world and the only thing that's going to keep you upright are those gauges on your instrument panel. But moving the head back and forth quickly or bending over and trying to tune something in on your radio stack, the aircraft can immediately get into an unusual attitude. What happens is it just starts out as a slight deflection of the cyclic. The helicopter makes a slight turn to the right or left or a descent or a climb and you'll feel that because of the inner ear and you'll make usually an aggressive movement with the cyclic stick to recover. And all that does is throw off your inner ear, your balance even more and you end up getting into spatial disorientation rather quickly. This one actually is real easy to get into the somatographic illusion, rapid accelerations, they say, during takeoff. But this can also happen. You're in straight and level flight and if you increase that collective and start to speed up and you've lost your horizon, it'll feel like you're getting a nose up attitude. And what's the pilot do? He forces the cyclic forward, now he goes into a dive. Same thing can happen when you do a real rapid deceleration. So, you know, if anybody finds themselves in inadvertent imc, the whole goal is don't make abrupt control movements. You have to stay away from that because that's how you get these illusions and they can be very dangerous. Then you've got the elevator illusion. If you've got really strong updrafts or downdrafts, you may feel that you're in a constant climb or in a constant descent. That's why your gauges will tell you if you're climbing or descending. Look at your airspeed indicator. What's that tell you? If it's increasing speed, your nose is down and you're descending. If you're bleeding off airspeed, what's happening, you are in a climb, you know, you got gauges there, that's what they're there for. So you have to use them. We'll skip on real quick to, we're going to pass the next two or three and we're going to go to aeronautical decision making. There'll be slide 13, and we'll talk a little bit about fitness for flight, because I think some people, they ignore this quite a bit. The pilot in command obviously is responsible for and is the final authority of the flight. Doesn't matter if you're going out for fun, if you are working for somebody, someone's hired you to take them somewhere. You work for a law enforcement agency or an EMS company, doesn't matter. You as the pilot in command, are directly responsible for that flight, and you're the final authority. So get that in. Let that sink in deep. You are the one that says go or no go. Nobody else tells you you do it yourself. You have to have limitations, though, that second bullet point. In order to make effective decisions regarding the outcome of a flight. You must understand your own limitations. You have to. If you don't have any limitations, you need to find some. We talked about, you know, not going flying if the visibility and the ceilings are certain conditions. Add in wind conditions. I'm not going to go fly if the wind conditions are, you know, maybe greater than 10 knots, gusting, you know, 15 knots, you know, whatever it is, as your experience level changes, your limitations will change. And then the last bullet point is pilot's performance during a flight affected by many factors such as your health. That's a big one. Your recency of experience. Looks like I got a typo on that one. Recency of experience, your knowledge, your skill level and your attitude, all that stuff comes together and that's, you know, for your performance to be a safe and effective, safe and effective one, you have to take all of these things into consideration. So if you're not feeling well, you shouldn't be flying. Bottom line, I can't tell you how many times people show up to work sniveling, coughing, sneezing, headaches, aches and pains, and they want to go fly. And you're like, why are you doing that? You tend to spend more time thinking about your illness than actually flying the aircraft, and that could be a problem. So now at the bottom, I put the I'm safe rule. A lot of people giggle at this acronym, but there's a reason this acronym is out there. It is very, very important. And if you go down through the I'm safe checklist, you know, are you. Do you have any illness? Are you taking any medications? Have you had sleep? That's a big one. Law enforcement officers, EMS pilots, firefighting aircraft pilots, these guys work a lot of hours and they May not get a lot of sleep and they may be doing a 12 hour day with four or five hours sleep and then they're out flying again the next morning. That's not the safest thing to be doing. Your reaction times are going to be a lot slower. The I'm safe checklist is for every pilot after the S for sleep, A for alcohol. No drinking. You cannot be drinking and then getting in an aircraft and going flying. I've read so many reports where the pilot's blood alcohol level was ridiculous. I couldn't believe that this pilot actually got in the aircraft and went flew. And same thing with medications. Taking pain medications, things like that. Stay out of the cockpit. F that can be fatigue. Know if you are fatigued, you're going to be tired. Think about times when you're driving down the road, how many people have been driving down the road and all of a sudden they kind of snap out of that haze and they go, where am I? I don't even remember the last exit that I passed. It's because they were fatigued, they were tired and they didn't even remember that they what they where they'd gone the last 10 miles. Pilots do the same thing. Very dangerous for pilots. And then e can be emotion or eating. When's the last time you eaten? If you just have a big argument with your wife or your kid and you're just pissed off like no one can believe. Probably not a good idea to get in an aircraft. So again, aeronautical decision making. You got to be smart about what you're doing. The next slide just talks about hazardous attitudes. And the reason I like to throw this one in is that first. Meteorological conditions and ended up hitting the ground hard. Where would he fall into the categories here? Is it the anti authority? You know, don't tell me. I don't think so. I don't think he was there. Impulsivity. Do something quickly. Yeah, I think he wanted to do something quickly. Invulnerability, it's not going to happen to me. Yeah, I think a little bit of that might have been there because he knew what the weather conditions were. The macho. I can do it. I don't know. It's possible. And the resignation. What's the use? No, I don't think he fell into that. But if you read any accident, the story itself, you can probably fit every single pilot from an accident into one of these categories. So as new pilots or seasoned pilots, you need to stay away from these. You can see what the antidote is. It's kind of silly. They call it the antidote statement. But they're there for a reason. If you're the anti authority, don't tell me type of person, actually you need to be following the rules. That's really all they're saying. Let's go on to the next one real quick here. Let's get into immediate actions because this is probably what most people want to know about is what do I do if I find myself in inadvertent imc? Well, we talked about the avoidance. Always avoid it at all costs. Do that thorough weather briefing. So you will avoid it, but let's just say you didn't do any of those things and you found yourself in imc. You have to have a plan. One of the big things is you have to minimize distractions in the cockpit. Immediately, immediately. You, you need to fly the aircraft we've always talked about ava navigate and communicate. Aviate that aircraft, fly that aircraft. Keep it straight and level. You have to fly. You cannot stop flying the aircraft at all costs. You have to scan your instruments. Now I'm not going to go into. There's different ways of scanning. Maybe we can do another video on that some other time. But you have to have a technique to scan the instruments. So the only way you're going to have that is if you practice. And the only way you're going to practice is if you go out and you find yourself a CFI that's competent in teaching you these things so that you understand what a scan is. If you lose the horizon, you want to minimize changing frequencies, putting your head down, looking away from the instruments. You don't want to be moving your head around and shifting your eyes all over the place. You want to keep your eyes on the instruments. It's a constant scan. It never stops until you get back into BMC conditions. Go to the next slide. We're getting to the end here. So you've gone inadvertent. Imc. Immediately transfer your eyes to the instruments and start the scan. You want to get to a 0 degree roll, in other words, level flight. And if necessary, a 500 foot per minute climb isn't going to hurt anything. That's a little five degrees a nose up. Because if you're in an area where there's terrain, I know people across the country and around the world. There's different terrains where I fly. We're mostly flatlanders, we're down at sea level but we do have some hills and things that to the east of our local area that if we were headed Eastbound and went inadvertent imc. If we did not climb, we would crash right into the side of a hill. So I put a little thing in there that says fly away from terrain if applicable. And I put mef, that's your maximum elevation figure. So on every VFR chart you have the quadrants and you have two numbers and they're usually like a maybe, let's say it's a five and a three. 5,300ft, you know, something like that. Know the elevation in your area and that'll dictate whether you need to climb 500ft per minute or if you need to. Or I'm sorry, if you need to climb up 500ft or if you need to climb up 1500ft. It's all going to depend on where you're at. But we have a 0 degree roll climb if necessary. Set your airspeed plus or minus 5 knots of what you have practiced in simulated IMC conditions with a flight instructor. That speed that I have found typically anywhere around 80 knots, plus or minus 5 knots. If you got down to 70 knots, that's not so bad. If you're Trekking along at 95 to 100, that's a little fast to be an inadvertent IMC conditions or IMC conditions. You just want to slow the aircraft down. It's no different than when you're driving in the fog. You're driving along and you have fairly good visibility and you're doing 60 miles an hour and all of a sudden you hit a fog bank. You're not going to continue at 60, 70 miles an hour. You're probably going to slow down 40 or 30. Just common sense. Slow down. And then a verbal notification I've got in here because I do teach this to our law enforcement officers. Verbal notification to the crew that you are an inadvertent imc. Well, if you have a passenger or you have a friend with you or another pilot, doesn't matter, let them know you are in instrument meteorological conditions. And you need to verbalize where are you, what's your location, what's your altitude and what's your heading. And you have to stay calm. So we got zero degree roll climb. If you need to set your airspeed, slow it down, verbalize that you've gone in, invert an imc, what's your location, what's your altitude and what's your heading. And you're going to know the altitude and heading because you're going to be scanning and you should know where you're at. You should always know where you're at. So those, those right there, location, altitude and heading should not be a difficult thing to do. 17 the next slide. Once you have control of the aircraft initiated, your climb in your own course. Now you communicate. You could squawk, squawk emergency code 7700 on your, on your transponder. But here's the thing. If you haven't practiced flying on goggles, just using the instruments and then reaching over to change a squat code or maybe change a radio frequency, this is where lack of practice and lack of a plan can get you into trouble. So we want to communicate with atc. There's nothing wrong with declaring emergency. It is an emergency, because if you don't do something right now and you stay in those conditions, your chances of survival go down. If you have no plan and no practice and you can't keep a scan going, you're probably going to end up with an accident investigation. Nobody wants that. So declare the emergency, ask for help. There's nothing wrong with that. Once the aircraft is stable, only then. Now, this is a lot of contention. A lot of people will probably disagree with this. Some people may agree with it either way. My personal opinion, the way I teach our guys, is once they've gone through all the steps of getting the aircraft contained and they've squawked 7700, if need be, they're up with ATC. You're going to get vectors to an airport, you're going to have to turn eventually. You're not just going to keep flying straight. Eventually you're going to have to turn. So my thing is, if I just went inadvertent IMC and it was VFR just before I went inadvertent imc, once the aircraft is stabilized, then and only then, and if I practice, then I'm gonna make a very gentle turn and I'm gonna do a 180 degree turn to exit the IMC conditions. If a person is not, has not practiced that is not competent, I'd still be up with ATC. I tell them what I'm doing. But you have to decide what's best for you making that turn. This is where things can get spatial disorientation can set in rather quickly here. So if the practice has been there and you're up with ATC and you can make the turn, make the turn. But when I say that no more than about a 10 degree or bank no more than 10 degrees, I mean, and that's it. Go out on a VFR day and just do a 10 degree turn and see what that's like. It's a very slow, slow turn and you got to keep the scan going the entire time. But before you make the turn, whatever heading you're on, look and see what's the 180 degree reciprocal to that? What is it? If you were flying on a 360 heading, you need to turn to a 180 heading to get out of there. So you just have to make a conscious note of what it is. Or if you have a heading bug, put the heading bug on the 180 degree reciprocal and then a slow gentle 10 degree turn until you roll out on the heading and then fly that heading. It's probably going to take a couple minutes for you to exit, but then you should exit VFR and go take the helicopter and land at an airport and don't go flying anymore until you recovered from that, because that's going to be a very stressful event for you. But that's about the only way that I teach our guys is declare the emergency, get up with ATC and when you're comfortable, make the turns. If you don't want to make the 180 degree turn, take the vectors from ATC and they will vector you to an airport. The biggest problem is a panic driven desire to exit IMC or recover from an unusual attitude. All that leads to is a situation where you're going to lose control of the aircraft. And that's the last thing we want. The last slide is a big thing for you to remember is once you encounter inadvertent IMC conditions, the ground is no longer your friend. Do not lower the collective and try and hunt for the ground because you may eventually find the ground, but it may still be in IMC conditions and you don't want to have that happen. You there, Kenny?

Yeah, I was just pointing at Gary and good job. That's a lot of stuff for people to absorb. And of course, if you got anything.

Else you want to add, and I do, yeah.

I'll give you just a little break here. Just a couple of things that came up in the YouTube chat. Taz Christman, who Brian, who you haven't met yet, but you know, you've seen him in our videos and he'll be here in the next couple weeks to go live with us. He'll be back during December. Taz said, If you ever get the chance to chance to get training in a Barony chair, it is well worth it. You really get to see how your body lies to you absolutely do you know what that is, Brian?

Yeah, and I just a real quick. I went through. Back in 1987, I believe it was. I was in South Carolina when I went to my primary fixed wing flight training. We went to Shaw Air Force Base. They put us through an altitude chamber, they put us through the chair. They put us through all kinds of things that their pilots go through. And I will tell you, your body lies to you all the time. When you have no visual reference. It is something that if you, if you can afford it and you can experience it or you can find. Find a place to experience these types of things, you really should go out there and do that because you'll never forget the experience.

Okay. And then Harley said, what do you suggest for wire strike avoidance? And Taz jumped right in there. Don't fly below the minimum safe altitudes. Right?

Exactly, exactly. You know, wire strikes happen more often than people realize. And I still, for the life of me can't figure out why people will intentionally put themselves in a position where they can have a wire strike. There's no reason to be down that low unless your job is to work around power lines. That's about the only time you should have an aircraft near a power line is if you're working. If that's your job, that's what you do. Other than that, you need to steer clear, you need to stay away from them.

Well, you did a good job. You're so much better than what I could do. I mean, I do good at just telling stories about being there, out in the real world, but with all the training you've done, not only in your career, but especially in the, Even the last six months or a year, all the stuff you've been doing, you've been heavy into this and teaching it. So this is awesome.

Well, and I tell you, I went through it pretty quickly. But real quick, I just want to let people know after we do the ground session. Usually I do this with one pilot, sometimes two, and we just have a conversation. We go through the PowerPoint, we talk about different things that they've experienced, things I've experienced. But when we get in the aircraft, what I do is, because we all wear helmets, it's kind of interesting. It works out really well. But because we wear flight helmets and we have the visors that flip down, a friend of mine actually turned me onto this, but we use what's called. It's tinted window. It's that stick on film. You can peel it on and off. It doesn't. It doesn't leave any residue on your lens. But what we do is I cut it out so that it fits the pilot's visor, and when it's in the down position, it's like wearing a pair of foggles. All they can see is out the little window and they can see straight ahead onto the instrument panel. So what we do is we depart VFR and we're flying along, and I'll give them vectors for flying, and then I usually will say, hey, do you have that traffic out out their side of the aircraft? Hey, you got that airplane 2,000ft and a mile and a half. And they'll turn their head and they'll look for the traffic. I'll reach up and I'll put their visor down immediately and tell them, you've just gone inadvertent imc. Because usually it's a surprise. You don't know when it's coming. It just happens. Now they immediately have to transition to the instruments and they have to fly. And because we do this every six months, they're getting so much better. It's really neat to see how well they've improved. The first time I did it with them, within probably 20 seconds, we were either in a climb, in a banking dive, we were all over the place. They were having such a hard time keeping the aircraft straight and level because they just lost their outside reference to the world and they had to go to the instruments and they didn't have any practice. But as we continued to fly, they got better and better. And one of the things I'll do with them is I'll have them fly along, I'll get on the controls with them and they'll be straight and level, and I'll tell them to close their eyes. It's just a demonstration of what the vestibular system will do and how will you react to it. I have them close their eyes, and once they have their eyes closed, I tell them they have the controls. And of course, I'm taking precautions. I'm their eyes from the outside world. I'm scanning precautions traffic. I'm handling the radios and I'm guarding the controls. I'm not going to let them get us into a position where we can't get out of it. And that's what an instructor should be doing. But I'll tell them, okay, fly straight and level. That's all I want you to do. Don't do anything but fly straight and level with your eyes closed. And every single one of them within 45 seconds or less, had the aircraft in an unusual Attitude just because they were listening to their vestibular system. And I'll make them tell me, tell me what you feel. And they'll say, I feel like I'm turning left. Well, I'm looking out the window and we're not turning left. We're flying straight and level. And then they correct for it and they put us into a right turn. Then they put us into a dive. Then they'll say it feels like they're tumbling, like they're falling over. So those are just little things that I do with the guys to really drive home the importance of staying on the gauges and paying attention to what they tell you. And it's just one of those things that we found that works real well for us.

Awesome. It's about 1:50, so we'll start wrapping things up. Saw Valentine said awesome. Class Taz Christman said, awesome or excellent info. Think about there's anything you want to add, Gary, when I mention people. Hey, I haven't mentioned it yet. Subscribe to our channel if you're new. New to our channel, subscribe the channel. Make comments down below. Even if it's later on and you see this video later, there is a link down below for some specials going on right now that will be gone very soon, but there's some links for others if you, if you get in past the cyber big Cyber Week sales. Anything you want to add, Gary? I'll go over to your camera for a minute. What do you think about today?

Well, like the video, subscribe to the channel and if you're not a ground school member, join. This is the time to join. First time ever. Kenny's given 30% off every single membership cyberthirty code you put in the promo section. And I certainly enjoyed hearing Brian talk about Inverton imc.

Well, I'm sure that hopefully Brian will be game to do this again sometime in the future. This is the first time having him here. You know, all these years talking about Brian, saying he's a figment of my imagination. Now, you know, Brian really someone who is involved and he's not just a figment of my imagination. So we'll start wrapping it up. Thanks, Brian, for, you know, last night jumping in and trying to figure out how to make this work. And again, it's been, you know, a little frustrating. But hey, you know, we're learning, we're getting better and anybody that's been watching knows that we continually kind of keep moving this thing forward and it gets better and we're learning every single week. It Just gets better and better.

Absolutely. I really want to emphasize to all your viewers and people that may view this later on down the road as a replay video, get yourselves out there with a good cfi. It's really important. You got to find somebody that has a passion for teaching and get out there and do some work under the hood. And by all means, if you have the ability to get that instrument rating, get the instrument rating. That does not mean, because you have an instrument rating that if you went inadvertent imc, that it's no big deal. Because go to the accident databases and you will find that a lot of the people that are crashing helicopters are instrument rated. The problem is they're not staying current. They're not getting out there and practicing. So if you're not an instrument pilot, you really need to get out there and practice under the hood with a flight instructor. And I would strongly urge you to pursue that instrument rating because instrument ratings, there's so much involved in flying without visual reference. The whole reason it takes 40 hours of flying just to get an instrument rating. So that's a lot of training. It's a valuable training. I can't stress that enough.

My last thought is everything we've talked about, if it happened to me today, considering I'm an instrument ready pilot that doesn't have a lot of recent experience for me, I know there's towers nearby. I would start climbing, I'd get on the instruments and I would call for help. I would squawk emergency frequency. I would squawk emergency. I would climb and I would get a hold of somebody and admit it and say, I'm an advertent imc. I'm an emergency, emergency and I need help. And I just let them vector me into whatever airport they can get me to. That's where I'm at. After my almost 20 years of flying as an instrument pilot who's not real comfortable because I haven't been doing much of it, that's what I would do. I would just. If I went inadvertent IMC today, which it won't happen because I'm not going to do it. But if I did, I would climb, get on the instruments and I would call for help. This is exactly what I would do and admit that I just screwed up and I would be saying, I have an emergency, give me some help.

Yep, I agree.

Well, how's Chris Hauser? Said he wants to meet you someday. Hopefully Brian hopefully will make it out here. He wants to come to Indiana at some point.

Yeah.

What may happen in the future. You know, especially Brian retires in a few years. A bunch of great infos. That's awesome. Hopefully you get to meet Hauser. You want to hang around for a minute, Brian? I'll we got a debrief, but I'm gonna roll a little bumper here for everybody. Thanks everybody that's been here for tuning every week. There's some links down below. Subscribe to our channel, leave comments and we will see you in the next video.

Sam.