Yes, as a student, in the TA-4J, back in '88. It was the main gyro, that began spinning randomly. We were above a solid cloud deck. My instructor took over, and we checked the weather at the NAS. They reported the ceiling had dropped to 100'. The Instructor happened to know that one of his squadron-mates from his last fleet squadron was out there, in our working area, and he made an interesting decision: He asked the squadron-mate to lead us in, as a section formation. When we saw the runway, we would complete the landing, while he went back around. This is a good plan, if you're really confident about your formation flying skills. But, if you were to lose sight of your lead, low, slow, descending at 550 fpm, and then have to transition to scanning the peanut gyro, it could get pretty tense. What would you do? The runway appeared at 50' AGL, and we're here to talk about it. Would you have chosen to set up as a single plane, to get used to scanning that little peanut gyro, before going IMC?

On Saturday, December 4, 1999 at 3:00:00 AM UTC-5, St Stephen Ames wrote:
> I would like to hear any stories of folks that have survived a gyro
> failure since this is the topic of the week...
> Blue skies,
> St Stephen Ames
> PP-ASEL
> N16402
> PA-28-180
> My flying site: http://www.stephenames.com/flying/flying.html
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> - Another part of my pre-flight passenger briefing -
> 'Smoking is not permitted inside the cabin; however smoking outside
> the cabin should be reported to the captain immediately!'