Any pilot who has used a personal airplane for regular transportation has had to negotiate bad weather. By the time you accumulate more than 4500 hours of flight time, it’s likely you have dealt with a cold front or three, plus night IMC and a variety of other challenges. With that kind of flight experience spread over decades, you might think you’ve seen everything and know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. But experience can be a double-edged sword: We might well be better equipped to deal with a challenge, but that very confidence may make us complacent.
Our experience might interpret an IFR night flight into frontal weather as a challenge but not beyond our capabilities. And over that time, we’ve probably flown into IMC momentarily without either IFR currency or an appropriate clearance. And we might even think, “Yeah, there’s some weather out there, but I can see it, my destination is only a couple hours away and I’ve flown this route before, so I don’t even need a weather briefing.” There’s a lot going on with that kind of thinking.
