In more than 30 years of flying I have flown only a handful of ILS approaches with the weather right at minimums. The same is true for most pilots. I think the reason is that the weather seldom cooperates. Fog frequently drops the visibility well below the required minimums, but mist, drizzle and rain usually cut visibility close to a mile instead of the half-mile that is the standard minimum on an ILS.
Because the weather is so fickle, training in the most sophisticated simulators is the best IFR practice a pilot can get. The newest visual displays do a nearly perfect job of simulating what a real ILS approach in minimum visibility looks like. That wasn't true even a few years ago, when even the best simulator visual displays tended to have you popping out of the obscuration into reasonable visibility. That kind of "breaking out" doesn't happen in real airplanes when the weather is at minimums.
As luck would have it, a few days before I was headed to Wichita for recurrent training in FlightSafety International's new Level D Citation CJ2 simulator, I got to fly an ILS to real minimums. As is usually the case, the forecast didn't predict this rare opportunity.
Stancie and I were headed back home from a visit to Sun 'n Fun in Florida. The debut of EAA's Countdown to Kitty Hawk exhibit featuring the exact reproduction of the Wright's original 1903 Flyer was even better than I had expected.
The most popular aspect of the Countdown to Kitty Hawk exhibit appeared to be Wright Flyer simulators that Microsoft has created. People stood in line to take their turn at flying the nearly unflyable original airplane, but the time passed quickly, thanks to the entertainment of watching the simulated flights on large screens. The Flyer barely climbs at all, and most pilots lose control in roll as they try to nurse the nose up without stalling. The simulators will humble you, and at the same time increase your admiration for Wilbur and Orville.
The forecast for my home airport, Westchester County, New York (HPN), was unremarkable for my IFR flight. The lowest ceiling predicted for the day was 500 feet with visibility no lower than a mile. Winds were expected to be light, temperatures were well above freezing, so ice wasn't an issue, and there was no precipitation in the forecast. Get past the thunderstorms in the southeast and we were home free.
But the weather didn't read the forecast. Before departure, the visibility at HPN was a quarter mile. That will burn off, I assumed, because fog wasn't in the forecast.
As we flew along, I used the Garmin GDL 49 satellite downlink system to get the metar report from HPN every hour. The quarter-mile visibility didn't change, but neither did the forecast.
I checked again during a fuel stop at Kinston, North Carolina, and the report was still a quarter-mile with a new forecast that parroted the first, predicting two miles visibility or more for the entire period. With hours worth of reserve fuel we set off to take a look. Sure enough, on the next hour the metar reported visibility up to one and a half miles. The forecast was coming true.
