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Mr. Luddite

On 2/17/2015 11:27 PM, Wayne.B wrote:
On Tue, 17 Feb 2015 23:12:38 -0500, wrote:

On Tue, 17 Feb 2015 19:00:07 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

Try "the hood". The hood is a device that you wear that limits your
field of view to the inside of the airplane only. All you can see is
the instruments. Your instructor will take control of the airplane and
put it in an unusual attitude meaning it may be banked over and
descending or in a banked climb nearing stall. He'll then say, "Your
plane" and you learn to recover using instruments only with no ground
reference. When you are in a banked turn, you can't tell by the seat
of your pants. The airplane could be standing on one wing tip and you
wouldn't know other than by instruments.

That is the kind of thing that might have brought down the plane in
the Java sea.

===

Also the sort of thing that brought down young Kennedy off the coast
of Marthas Vineyard. He was not instrumented rated but approached MV
in the dark on a hazy night. They theorize that he became disoriented
and put the plane into a stall/spin that he didn't know how to recover
from.

I think so also. Very easy to become disoriented with no ground
reference and not able to understand what your instruments are telling
you. It can happen very quickly in fog or clouds that come up
unexpectedly. It's the whole purpose of "hood work" when taking flight
instruction which, BTW, is part of the lesson plan for a simple VFR rating.