If you google for IMC, you might come up with the Independent Media Center, the International Medical Corps, IMCglobal, and the Internet Mail Consortium, but you'd be flipping pages for days before you came upon the IMC I was looking for. My IMC stands for instrument meteorological conditions. It is defined in one on-line glossary this way: "Weather conditions bad enough that the pilot is controlling the aircraft only by reference to instruments."

Four years ago, I earned my Instrument Rating as a private pilot. I had studied and trained over ten months, and after missing one piece of the first test, I passed the second time. So according to the FAA, I could fly in those bad weather conditions; I could fly using instruments alone. I haven't been flying much during the past couple of years, but during that whole period there had never been an occasion for me to fly in bad weather. Last week I flew in IMC for the first time.

Nor, truth be told, was the weather actually bad when I went up with Jason, my flight instructor, who was flying with me to make sure that I did, in fact, know how to fly by instruments alone. Jason has been on this planet all of 21 years, but he is a natural instructor. He handled me easily and effectively, examining and informing with a smooth precision that filled in some important gaps in my awareness and added confidence to my ticket.

We were flying out of Monterey, which was, quite typically, shrouded in a layer of fog. The bottom of the clouds sat at around 1600 feet and the tops were up to 2800. At the rate we were climbing, it took about a minute and a half to climb through the opacity to the blue skies above. Leveling off at 3500 above Monterey Bay, vast puffy white fields stretched out in all directions. Some distance away, thirty to fifty miles, there was a ring of mountains rising above the blanket. Nothing poked out from the clouds to the west.

The exercise was for me to fly back through the clouds and emerge in line with Runway One-Zero-Right, and at a speed and altitude that would allow me to land. That meant positioning the plane with some guidance from Air Traffic Control but relying primarily on six instruments in the dashboard before me. This while filtering out the ATC chatter with other pilots, hearing various beeps when we passed electronic buoys, and with my sixth sense making sure I wasn't doing anything to send the implacable but generously affable Jason into a tailspin.

Here's basically what it means to fly by instruments: the closer you get to the airport, the more acute the horizontal and vertical angles you follow to get down and to the right place. Correcting one direction or another becomes a far more sensitive proposition than when one is ten miles out. So I'm glad I didn't see a print-out of my track on the first approach. I would have scribed the track of a Disney ride.

My second try was considerably better than the first, though some of the passengers in steerage might have thought we were still a little zig-zaggy. Hey, chill out back there. I'd never done this before. I'd worn foggles -- partially-fogged goggles used in training -- so I couldn't see through the cockpit window, but I could always see, indeliberately, out of the corners of my eyes. Not this time. Everything outside was greyish white. Plus, there wasn't time to look outside. I had to keep up The Scan.

The Scan includes watching the airspeed indicator. I don't want to be going too fast when I get down since there aren't any air brakes on a small plane. If you are zooming, you have to execute a go-around to lose the extra speed, and that's embarrassing. It says you weren't paying attention upstairs.

I'm also watching two gauges which show the attitude of the plane, as in, are the wings level and how steeply am I pointed toward the ground. It should be about three degrees if I'm following the glide slope properly. That indication is illustrated by two arrows on either side of the Horizontal Situation Indicator, which features a needle in the middle that should be mostly straight up and down. Together, these two indices tell me where I am in relation to where I should be.

Finally I'm watching my altitude through the altimeter, which tells me how high I am above sea level and the vertical speed indicator which tells me how quickly I'm losing (or gaining) altitude. On most approaches I want to be descending at about 500 feet per minute. And at Monterey Airport, which is situated 254 feet above the Pacific, one can go all the way down to 186 feet above the ground looking for the runway before you have to decide that it's safe or not to land.

As I said, we were breaking out of the clouds at 1600 feet or so, which meant that there was plenty of time to get visually oriented, tweak the direction, slow the plane down and do whatever else was necessary for a safe landing. But this kid's eyes were so glued to the instruments, the fact that I could actually see and make a non-instrument landing at that point didn't matter a whit. In fact, I didn't even look outside until the reading on the altimeter told me that I was at the decision height.

The third time was a charm. Back up through the clouds, this time without the little stomach churn, and we flew around above the whiteness while the more important traffic got routed hither and thither. When it was our turn, bang-zoom; I had indeliberately taught myself a trick. As my eyes were scanning, I was speaking my way through the instruments, adjusting with my hands in accordance with comments like, "chase that sucker over to the left a hair," "not too much," "speed's good," and similar fare. The needles were all pointing the way and to where they should.

The landing wasn't bad either. The first time I'd been out with Jason, ten days earlier, I'd returned to Monterey and made one of the best five landings in the six years I'd been flying. His comment, "An American Airlines pilot would have been proud of that landing." This from a young man who was young enough to be a young son. And when I was taxiing back to Monterey Bay Aviation after my first IMC, Jason said, "You done did good, boss."