You don't have to bet, it's happened. A Lancair/Glasair owner, VFR on top of a thick cloud deck, suffered a total engine failure. He flew the video game down below the cloud deck and landed without incident... He was in the clouds for more than 10 minutes on descent... Never lost situational awareness, never lost control, ATC talked to him the whole way. He made course changes coming down as well. The system kept him advised of his gliding range, and he picked an airport rather early in the process that he could easily meet with reserve altitude. Broke out of the clouds only around 1000 AGL as I recall, and landed straight-in. He had a GoPro mounted on the rollbar and audio jacked in, the whole video was on YouTube when it happened.goingnowherefast wrote: ↑Thu Dec 06, 2018 8:15 pmSame problem with avionics. Look at a home-built aircraft panel. Non certified avionics with huge screens, synthetic vision, the works. I bet that would have prevented some night CFIT or VFR into IMC accidents. A $10,000 non-certified panel is safer than the junk in most Cessnas, but probably costs about the same.
Caveat: I think he had an autopilot as well, or at least a wing-leveller, that surely helped. Still, all of that in an Amateur-Built can be done for about $10K at time-of-build. Good luck getting a fully certified equivalent into a Cessna for twice that.
