I’m glad you made this point, because it seems like at the end of the day the rotorcraft community has a cultural problem with instrument flying, and I’m curious if you’ve run into it as a fixed wing to rotor wing conversion?
Modern multi-turbine helicopters (including military) have an over abundance of the necessary bells and whistles for safe IFR flight including glass cockpit, FMS, SAS, helipilot, etc... and the lowest common denominator is the human in the seat, their lack of instrument currency and/or cultural reluctance to pick up a pop-up IFR clearance instead of taking the more familiar option of heading up a box canyon in degrading SVFR conditions.
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Especially in Southern CA, where most of the time the “marine layer” advection fog is only 500-1000 ft thick, it’s a pretty trivial task to: pick up a pop-up clearance, climb through a very thin layer, cruise on top clear of all the scary terrain, shoot an approach through said thin layer again to an airport on the other side of the scary terrain, pop out below the layer and cancel and proceed VFR or SVFR to wherever you were originally going. Ok well trivial except you’re flying a dynamically unstable machine that’s constantly trying to kill you, but hopefully the SAS and the helipilot help a little bit with that part.
There are plenty of COPTER TACAN approaches around my parts too, so I know the military rotor wing community flies instruments somewhat regularly. Is it the civilian corporate/HEMS world that is hesitant? Or everybody since actual IMC time is just so rare? Do you have any thoughts on positive steps that could be taken to jog pilots to revert to IFR when the links in the chain are starting to align towards a CFIT accident?
This topic seems to have a lot in common with the Alaska fixed wing CFIT accident threads over the years, and I’m also curious if any lessons learned from that community might also be applicable here?