Vindication

We watched the footage together, RTH with his eagle eyes spotting stuff that I may have missed.

“Pause it there,” he said, “look, you can’t even see the stacks at this point.”

He also pointed out the fact that the CN tower was obscured, the view to the north was getting worse and that it was indeed reasonably thick even if it was just passing through. Then we realised that a plane behind me was landing early and cutting short their flight for cloud based reasons.

The icing on the cake was the report from RTH that several students after me had taken off and landed fairly sharpish once they realised what was going on. RTH and Bob were up after me doing an instrument flight and they actually found themselves in proper IMC for a few seconds. Even after changing their plan for local east to local west in an effort to avoid the cloud.

Short story is: I made the right call and I have video evidence and other people’s decisions to back me up.

I feel pretty good about the whole thing actually. I found myself in a time critical situation and made the right decision, without undue panic. At least I know that when the chips are down, my brain does the right thing.  Even if I agonise over it afterwards.