A private pilot and his father-in-law made a 300-mile trip to visit a friend. It was winter. They arrived in late morning. They reported that they had encountered instrument conditions but had been able to drop down below the overcast and continue to the destination, an uncontrolled airport. This must have required some fairly low flying, because the overcast at the time of their arrival hung at 600 feet; but since the entire flight followed an ocean shoreline, navigation would not have been difficult. Visibility under the low ceiling was five miles, and the pilot invited his friend to join them in a short flight to an airport about 50 miles distant for lunch. The friend, not a pilot himself but evidently gifted with a circumspection that pilots often lack, declined on the grounds that the weather did not look very good.
The pilot, proud of his recently acquired Aero Commander 500, invited his friend aboard to show it to him. He started the engines and taxied the airplane to a parking spot. They then disembarked and went to lunch.
