[Ben Franklin]

Originally Posted by Shadywood

You really don't want to get me started, but since you asked, I'll tell you my most hair-raising flying story.

I was flying along in my 1973 Piper Cherokee to the Sun-N-Fun fly-in in Lakeland, from my home field in Tulsa. I had about 100 hours flying time in my logbook. For some strange reason, none of my buddies wanted to ride along on a 900 mile flight with a low-time pilot, just to sleep under a wing for three nights and ogle airplanes. I was flying alone.

So there I was, cruising along at 6,500 feet, on top of a broken layer of clouds, somewhere over south Arkansas. The holes were becoming fewer and fewer, so I picked a great big hole, bigger than a football field, and banked hard to the left to start a spiral down underneath the cloud layer. On the third rotation, it dawned on me that it might have been a good idea to drop the flaps, now that my airspeed was 10 miles over the speed at which the flaps would depart the plane if I tried to deploy them to slow down. And since I couldn't slow down, there was no way to avoid entering that cloud in a 45 degree bank at 120 mph.

As I entered the cloud, my flight instructor's words popped into my head: "The average lifespan of a VFR (amateur) pilot in IFR conditions (inside a cloud) is 2 minutes". This was exactly the way JFK Junior had managed to kill himself the previous year.

Well, somehow, I overcame my blind panic, and my 2 hours of FAA-required instrument training kicked in. I used the artifical horizon to right the plane, pulled up to level flight, slowed to about 80 -- and considered my situation. According to the altimeter and the map in my lap, my situation was: I was cruising along blind, at 2500 ft, on my way to a rendevous with a 3500 ft mountain at some point, and if I didn't find a way out of this mess in a couple of minutes, they would be sponging my remains from the side of some big hill in Arkansas.

Everything outside the plane was just a featureless grey -- exactly the same in every direction. And, once again, my instructor's words popped into my brain: "With nothing to focus on, the eye focuses on infinity". So I tried focusing on the compass, and then quickly looked outside. Amazing! For just a second, I could see faint differences in the grey. I kept doing this, and discovered that the grey was much lighter behind me, over my left shoulder. Maybe that was the hole! I carefully turned in that direction, using just the tips of the yoke (steering wheel) to nudge the plane slowly around (as I'd been taught), without risking an out-of-control spiral, like the one that killed Kennedy. And then I waited and prayed.

When I broke out of the side of that cloud, I swear I heard angels singing the Hallelujah Chorus!

It was like magic. I remember the sunlight and whisps of cloud suddenly appearing from the gloom, and I turned my head to see the vapor swirls in the cloud wall as I emerged. Beautiful! And straight ahead was the other side of the hole. I quickly DROPPED THE FLAPS and continued a CONTROLLED spiral to the bottom of the cloud. A couple of turns later, I was out, in barely VFR (Visual Flight Rules) conditions, at 1500 ft. Half hour later, the ceiling lifted, and the rest of the flight was uneventful (except for the crazy traffic at Lakeland).

And I learned my lesson about VFR-on-top so well that I managed to pull the same stupid stunt coming back from the Oshkosh fly-in five years later, with my best flying buddy, in a much faster plane. At least that time, I remembered the flaps, so no cloud time. But the haze was so bad below that I got some IFR time ("I Fly Roads"), creeping to the nearest airport at 500 ft over the middle of some backwoods state highway, to avoid the hitting a cellphone tower.

I guess some people are so dumb it takes two miracle escapes to learn the same lesson.

Thanks for sharing. Question. I can see why you would need a hole in the clouds for descending, but couldn't you just head upwards, without a hole in the clouds?