Petras,
It depends on the quality of the down.
By quality, I mean a few things. The first is the actual quality of the source down. WM down is incredibly clean and fibrous. It’s plumes do not stick together, and it dries fast.
The second is the quality of the down after it reaches you. If you don’t properly care for your down garments and clean them regularly, miniscule amounts of “soil” (the technical term for dirt, skin oils, dissolved solids left behand after evaporation, etc) can lengthen the drying time of a down garment.
I used a Flight for several years. Because it’s down, it’s simply not available to me as an insulating layer while hiking in very wet and cold conditions, ie, when the scat hits the fan. I’ve replaced it with a synthetic garment.
I’ve soaked my Flight a couple of times. Once was on a packrafting trip where I was rafting a mild river (Class 1+). I didn’t even bring a PFD and the weather forecast was good. Well, the weather turned bad. I put my flight on under a rain jacket for warmth, and warm enough for six straight hours of packrafting, even in cold, hard rain. Then, while kicking back and enjoying the scenery, the river took me over a 2-foot high diversion dam that I didn’t see coming. I flipped my raft because I had my eyes closed (recall, I’m enjoying myself here) and by the time my partner yelled that I was going over something he thought was Niagra Falls like, I didn’t have the time to ferry properly to make the drop. This was at the point in the river where we had to walk another 12 miles to camp for the night. Now I was cold, immediately hypothermic, and it had started to snow. I couldn’t wring out my jacket. It was a matted mess of down and there was no way I wanted it on my body. We built a fire and spent the night there. Had I had a synthetic garment, I could have wrung it out and put it on and it would not have been so uncomfortable to walk in, and I could have walked it dry.
In fact, I’ve been able to do this with synthetic on a few occasions.
I took a Montbell UL Parka with me on a ski/snowshoe trek in Yellowstone Park with Carol Crooker and Aubrin Heinrichs last spring. I didn’t take raingear. It rained and snowed the whole time (unexpectedly), and I wore the parka as my outerwear. It got soaked. I slept in it, I wore it at rest breaks, I packed it (stuffed it) soaking wet, I even wrung it out. It remained an effective insulator. There was no way any down garment could have survived this treatment.
Bottom line for me is: down is great if you have the opportunity to dry it (in the sun, or on your body in warm weather).
But what if you don’t?
Having said that, I still like my flight jacket for short trips in fair weather. It’s just so dang cozy! But now, it’s as light as the lightest synthetic garments out there (Montbell, Cocoon, Patagonia) so there are options now that didn’t exist a few years ago.
