I fly over desert every week, some of it hostile for landings. I regularly cross 400 mile distances on a schedule and lots of airline pilots fly way bigger legs than that. Even though I know my routes and general weather patterns, I regularly have to alter plans for weather. I don’t think you realize just how much opportunity for bad weather 1500 miles represents.
What is "hostile for landing" depends on what kind of airplane you fly. To be sure, a commercial jet (or even a private jet for that matter) cannot land at 35mph to 40mph like a little pipistrel virus can. Just imagine you are flying an airplane that is able to land on
EVERY airstrip in the USA. Compared to a jet, I'm guessing (just guessing) that increases the number of viable landing spots by a factor of 10... or 25... or maybe even 100.
I infer from your comment about 400 mile distances that you're probably not flying a jet of any size. Nonetheless, maybe you have an airplane that lands at 60mph or 80mph, which rules out many small airstrips. My only point being, the more airstrips you can land on, the less distance you need to fly to get to one. Plus, you can more often choose to fly a direction that gets you away from the worst weather conditions. Also, an airplane that can land on 35mph to 45mph can land safely at millions of places on rural roads out in the desert, or even just not too rough seconds of desert. At 60mph or 80mph your chances of damage greatly increase. But obviously you've know all this, as you go through this all the time.
If you regularly fly over deserts, I will assume you are somewhere "out west". Though flying out west has significant problems that pilots back east don't face (mainly endless high elevation mountains), in general visibility is vastly better... including visibility of weather in all directions. Back east, weather tends to be more uniform for hundreds of miles or more, whereas out west often you can see a violent thunderstorm "over there" and another "over there" but never be in any danger of needing to fly through any of them. Pilots back east have never seen such an environment, and I suppose pilots out west rarely see many kinds of weather that are common back east... including thick haze that extends right to the ground.
I suspect the nature of weather in the west is what you mean by "I regularly have to alter plans for weather". Doing that "out west" is a lot easier... even with tall mountains to avoid all over the place (unless you fly above 16,000 feet, which will at least keep you from slamming into a mountainside). So yeah, I've flown around weather when flying in the west too. That cannot be avoided unless you never fly except on totally clear days (and only for a few hours at that). But I've never had issues with weather that caused me to come even close to needing to fly in IMC. My only IMC was due to wearing the helmet.
I think we are all extra sensitive to some things, and less sensitive to others. I'm very comfortable at night for reasons I mentioned. But I am very sensitive to marginal weather conditions. Which is funny, because everyone here seems to have the impression that "this moron is happy to fly into a cloud with no idea what lies ahead". They could not be further from the truth!
One thing people here don't seem to understand. I never have a schedule to make. I never have appointments to make. I never have any reason to feel pushed to fly in marginal weather... or when I have a headache... or even when I just don't feel like flying. From what I can tell, it is those pressures that are most often responsible for getting pilots into situations that become dangerous or fatal. I simply don't have those pressures, and will not have those pressures. I will fly for fun, and fun means I can see forever. I fly to see the sights, not to get someplace. That's a difference, but apparently nobody hears this, and nobody can relate to this. Sigh.
I am trying my best to infer how things will be different now than when I was flying a lot. These are inferences and I say they are inferences. But when I even dare mention these inferences, people immediately jump on me and claim I pretend to know what I only infer and am still trying to learn. I mean, eventually I'll learn from flight instructors when I go get some update and refresher "rusty pilot" instruction in more modern airplanes. But I was hoping to get a jump on some of this now, because it helps me make various decisions like... what avionics to order for the airplane. Sadly, too many people just want to throw rocks and make false assertions about what I said. I'm not sure why people get suck a kick out of that.
There is another issue that again is an inference... based on living in Hawaii for 16 years. I'm sorry, but I have accumulated some experience about weather patterns in Hawaii, patterns that at first blush seem to generally apply all over the tropical and semi-tropical pacific ocean. Yet everyone immediately discounts all of this, no matter they've never lived on a tropical island in the pacific ocean... or even seen the pacific ocean in some cases. For example, in those 16 years, the sky is almost always clear (or close to clear) at dawn and dusk, as well as all night. On the other hand, there were almost zero days when puffy cumulus did not form in the early afternoon and stick around to some degree until close to dusk. The kind of weather variations that people elsewhere suffer... almost never occurs. So pilots who have not seen this, much less lived this, cannot imagine in their wildest dreams that weather patterns could be so regular and predictable. I understand. But I don't appreciate being called a complete scumbag because I did have these experiences and do have some basis to draw inferences. At the same time, I know the puffy white clouds are created by the mountains on all the islands, so the same dynamic does not exist over endless expanses of empty ocean. Nonetheless, I've watched weather patterns in the pacific ocean enough to have a basic but not detailed or extensive experience with weather in the warm portions of the pacific ocean. I know other islands with mountains in the south pacific have weather patterns similar to Hawaii, but there may be exceptions I don't know about. What I need to learn more about is... patterns and behavior I don't know about out in the middle of nowhere.
If you fly IFR, can you tell me what will make flying so much safer when push comes to shove? For example, what do you learn in IFR training that will safe your bacon in the event you cannot get to an airport that has IFR/ILS support? It seems to me that learning to flying more safely than I already can in IMC will be far more important than learning to land at an IFR/ILS airport. After all, few airports on tiny islands in the south pacific have IFR/ILS support, and in many cases I will not have sufficient fuel to get to the next airport with IFR/ILS systems. So my inference is, learning to get through and out of IMC conditions will be much more valuable than learning to land by ILS. After all, in all my years living on a tropical island in the pacific, there was probably a total of only 2 or 3 hours when there was anything remotely like fog... or clouds down to ground level or almost ground level. If that's true of the other islands in the south-pacific, then it seems to me that staying stable until I get to a place to land, then being able to pop out the bottom of the clouds to land, will be vastly if not infinitely more important than learning ILS skills, or even following strange complex ATC generated paths on approach and/or in the pattern. After all, my default plan is to
NEVER land at an airport with ATC, much less IFR/ILS... unless for some reason I absolutely have to.
So yeah, I am concerned about bad weather... I'm very sensitive to that issue. I just don't see that ATC and ILS is the issue for me, because I will rarely if ever land there, and in many cases would not have sufficient fuel to get there. Gads, it would be a nightmare to think I could only land by ILS... and run out of fuel and crash in the ocean because I tried to extend my flight too far to get to an ATC/ILS airport!
However, what I think is very important, is for me to become very practiced at getting my butt out of bad situations caused by weather. That could mean "safely flying above the top of the cloud level" for some time, which means flying in IMC while I'm climbing up top. Then of course there is potentially flying in MIC while flying back down through clouds and out the bottom. Obviously if I ever have to do anything like this on one of those long legs across the ocean, I care about being safe, not about "what rating do I have". The strange thing is, nobody seems to want to discuss these practical issues. They just want to throw rocks, call me names, and lie about what I actually said.
