The greatest challenge in flying is, to me, weather. It is changeable, unpredictable, and often pretty. Weather tends to have a personality, though it is hard to tell from one day to the next what that personality might be. All of which leads to a couple of tales.
The first trip was from Maryland to Dallas for the National Business Aircraft Association convention. A couple of us would be flying down, and the weather synopsis for the day appeared to be rather clear- cut. There was a line of thunderstorms out in my old stomping ground, Arkansas, and it would persist and prevail throughout the day. From experience, I knew that you go look at things like that, but you never tussle with them.
The switch in what was forecast came around Nashville. We elected to stop for fuel at John C. Tune Airport on the east side of town, away from American's hub at Nashville International Airport. (We should rename Carroll County Regional/Jack Poage Field in Maryland the Carroll County International Airport, because we fly from there to Canada.) Reliever airports can be a good deal, and they can be a bad deal. The good deal is the friendly service and the lower fuel prices at Tune. The bad deal is that the ATC procedures for using it often result in a lot of extra flying miles to avoid the traffic at the major airport. Also, if you choose to use the excellent service at Tune, do study the chart in advance. The field elevation is 495 feet, and there is a thicket of 2,049-foot obstructions in the area. They apparently enjoy their TV in Nashville.
Even though no inclement weather was forecast for the Nashville area, inclement weather was another factor in the selection of Tune as a fuel stop. The cumulus were building in the area and were even starting to show on radar. We managed to avoid them, and foolish optimist that I can be, I wondered if the line of weather that was supposed to be in Clinton land was actually in Gore territory. That was quickly proven by a call to flight service. The line of thunder was still in Arkansas.
Situations like this are always more fun when you have company, and not only did I have another pilot with me, we had a friend flying a Baron who was a few thousand feet below, headed in the same direction.
We quizzed the controller about the line in Arkansas, which was becoming visible both to the eye and to the Stormscope. The controller said to head for Walnut Ridge, a substantial detour to the right. We all dutifully headed in that direction.
When we got to the line, though, Walnut Ridge did not look like a good bet. The radar picture wasn't bad, and the Stormscope showed a lightning-free path, but there was nothing there that you could both look at and fly through. It was mean-looking stuff. Both of us turned to the southwest to parallel the line. As if to verify that this was a good decision, an airline Saab penetrated the line of thunderstorms where the controller said it looked best, and a crewmember reported severe turbulence. By definition, that means the airplane was momentarily out of control, and unsecured objects were tossed about. No thank you.
Down around Little Rock, which was on the original route before the deviation, the line broke a bit, and we were able to fly through in smooth air at low altitude. A bit of a surprise came when we discovered it was not really clear behind the line. There were still a lot of buildups, and later, there were massive thunderstorms just to the east of Dallas. The fact that this was a surprise to me mainly reflects on how long it has been since I lived in that part of the country. The lines of thunderstorms there are not really clear-cut until later in the fall and in the spring. At other times, you have lines and bunches of storms.
Low weather
Thunderstorms are one thing; low ceilings are another, as we found out on another flight. When the safety record is studied, we find that general aviation pilots have far more trouble, VFR or IFR, with low ceilings and visibilities than they have with thunderstorms. Perhaps this is because most pilots fear thunderstorms and acknowledge that they will pull the old feathers out. Low ceilings tend to be soft, amorphous creatures that do not exude hazard — right up until the last minute. Anyway, we had picked a weekend to run some errands purely on the basis that it was supposed to be a nice weekend, so I wouldn't have to work hard at the flying. Wrong. I managed to get two thirds of six months' worth of instrument currency that weekend, all thanks to low ceilings.
I was already fat on logbook currency. I had 12 actual approaches in the preceding six months and 19 hours 15 minutes of actual instrument time. For some reason, though, I didn't feel all that current and didn't realize that I had all that much recent experience. Perhaps that was because it had been two months since I had flown a really low approach and the same length of time since I had flown in a widespread area of inclement weather.
The first approach was an ILS with a 600-foot ceiling to an airport that I off and on called home base from 1959 to 1988, Mercer County in New Jersey. You can't cut more slack than that. To up the ante, the next approach was to my current home base, Carroll County. The minimums there are high, about 700 feet above the ground, so it isn't exactly a low approach, though this day, the ceiling was right at the minimum.
The third approach of the weekend was the most interesting. I have been flying to Asheville, North Carolina, since the 1950s. I don't mean to cast any shadow on the weather in that resort area, but in a majority of arrivals there, the first glimpses of the area I have seen were the FAA's approach lights. This approach was the first low one I have made to Runway 16 since it added an ILS for that runway. The usual approach is to Runway 34. The approach to 16 has a 200-foot decision height and a visibility requirement of three quarters of a mile. The ATIS was precise in calling the weather 200 and three quarters.
We had been mostly on top of clouds and in smooth air at 12,000 feet on the trip to Asheville, but I could tell by looking at the clouds beneath that the smooth business might not last. The tallest mountains in the eastern United States reside in the area, and I could tell by the shape of the clouds beneath that the wind was flowing over those mountains. The surface wind was only 9 knots from 140 degrees, but the cloud shapes suggested the wind would be stronger above the ground. A stronger wind a few hundred feet above the ground than on the surface is a typical condition in that mountainous area.
Any approach at Asheville is a dive-bomber attack because the minimum vectoring altitudes remain high until you are close to the final approach course. I knew the ones to the approach to Runway 34 well but was not really familiar with 16. Using the RNAV and the loran, I had an idea of how many flying miles I had to go before intercept but thought the controller was going to turn us on a downwind, then a base, and then onto the final approach course. To make sure, I asked. That wasn't his plan. He was just vectoring us to a final. That meant the descent would indeed be a steep one, so I extended the speed brakes, the ones on the belly with the tires attached. The most fouled-up ILS approaches occur when you intercept the localizer above the glideslope, and I was determined not to do this. With the weather at minimums and with wind shear a certainty, I wanted to get off to a good start.
On final, I was surprised at the amount of drift correction that was required. The surface wind was light and only 20 degrees off the runway, yet when I gave myself the "1,000 feet above minimums" call, I had 10 degrees of drift correction. That seemed almost unreal, but then I reminded myself that I was flying an approach to Asheville.
For some reason, the ground there always seems closer than it is, and when 200 feet above minimums, with patches of ground whipping by below, I felt like we were about 10 feet agl. Then the bumps and the shear came along. Knowing that the shear would involve a decreasing headwind, I was primed for a sinking spell and overcorrected with power and went a little high on the glideslope. The next reaction was to go for the glideslope, but now only 100 feet above minimums, I made myself resist that little temptation. The rate of sink was 500 feet a minute, the localizer needle was centered, and the runway was long. I just left things as they were, and as the runway hove into view, I was a little high but with everything else fine. I landed, thinking that I was sure glad we had picked a good-weather weekend to run these errands.
The final approach of the weekend was to home base. Again, the weather was reported by the AWOS as being at minimums, and it was. In fact, I thought this approach was a missed one until the last moment, when the runway showed up right where it was supposed to be.
I learned some lessons from all that weather flying. One was that the thunderstorm weather in thunderstorm country is as it has always been — mean — and that electronic devices only provide supplemental information. The area where the Saab crew penetrated and then reported severe turbulence might have looked okay on radar and on a Stormscope, but to the eye, it looked as bad as it must have felt to that crew and their passengers. Another lesson came from the weather forecasts that pretty well missed the mark on the weekend of the low approaches. It was just a reminder that you might set out on a flight that appears easy, but it might become a strong challenge along the way. Like the Scouts say, be prepared. Finally, when we consider ourselves current, we have to examine what this covers. If we fly a lot, we make enough approaches to fill in the logbook squares. That does not, however, mean that we are current to the extremes such as ILS approaches to minimums with wind shear a factor. If I had practiced a bunch of ILS approaches to minimums, I don't think I would have let that little wind shear at Asheville make me go high on the glideslope. The final lessons were about weather — fickle, but don't you love it?
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