I was adding up the numbers in my logbook the other day and came upon a revelation. The total came to two full years, or 17,520 hours. Having always been one to record milestones, I made a note that this one was passed as I flew to confer with my father, who was born before the Wrights' first flight and who started flying in 1927. I thought that was fitting. Then I started wondering what it means to fly for two full years. The answer is nothing, really, because only the next hour counts.
Experience is supposed to help because it means you have encountered more of the things that affect flights. I think, though, that a person could fly for three times as much as two years, or five times as much, and still not see all the things that can affect flights. Also, if a pilot convinces himself that he has seen everything, that pilot might be flying for a fall.
It is also possible to fly and experience things but not learn from them. For a pilot to get the most good from experience, that pilot has to go back and critique each flight, extract the lessons learned, and store them for future reference. I have always tried to do this but know that I have likely missed as many as I have stored. There are lessons on the airplane, on technique, and on dealing with weather. Because most of my flying has been for transportation, weather likely has the greatest number of entries stored — which leads to a tale.
Greg Harbaugh, AOPA 875036, an STS-54 astronaut and a general aviation pilot, invited me to the January shuttle launch. I very much wanted to go and made plans.
The date of the launch was preceded by plenty of adverse weather — snow, freezing rain, and fog. Some cold air had snuck in from the north under warmer air aloft, and it decided to stay for days. The whole eastern United States was affected. At the same time, the western United States was being hammered by record snowfalls.
The day before the launch, I was up early and into DUAT on my computer to check weather. I wanted to make the trip by way of Dothan, Alabama, if possible. The most common weather reported was a ceiling below 200 feet and visibility a quarter of a mile or less. The forecasts were for slow improvement to low IFR conditions. It took several sessions, as well as many references to the Jeppesen chart that shows terminal forecast locations, to find a legal alternate for Dothan. It turned out to be Gainesville, Florida.
Everything I got suggested that this would be a good trip to cancel. Though the area forecasts said the thunderstorms would be widely scattered, already convective sigmets announced embedded thunderstorms, and the convective outlook called for clusters of embedded thunderstorms over southern Georgia and northern Florida. Dothan was already reporting a thunderstorm. The radar reports were mostly less than 50 percent coverage, but the two in Georgia said the activity was increasing in intensity. The synopsis was complicated, but basically, there was an east/west frontal boundary across central Florida, drifting northward. A lot of moisture and a lot of instability existed north of the front. Even the time-honored look out the window gave pause and raised a question about the drive to the airport. The trees were drooping from fresh ice the evening before, and the visibility could be measured in feet.
I wouldn't take off with the visibility in feet, and the AWOS at my new home base, Winchester, Virginia, said the visibility there was a quarter of a mile. Washington Dulles International had landing minimums in runway visual range (RVR), so if I took off and then wanted to land, I would have to fly only 30 miles to do so.
The risks in a low-visibility (anything under 1 mile) takeoff are obvious. I think they are small enough to accept and have always done so — down to a limit. Even though instrument takeoffs used to be taught, and may still be taught in some places as far as I know, I like to be able to see most of the takeoff-run distance before starting out.
I decided to at least have a look, based on the fact that the weather would be okay to start with. The drive to the airport was fine, and once there, I got a clearance from Dulles on the remote frequency and headed out. I had filed for 6,000 feet, and at first, this altitude was in clouds, but the ride was smooth. Then I flew into a condition that I have seen only a few times before. The tops beneath were low, absolutely flat, and extended for as far as I could see. The mountains were sticking out of the tops. There was a featureless higher overcast. The visibility between layers was completely unlimited in this monochromatic wonderland.
The flying didn't take much work, so I was spending time checking weather and studying the Stormscope. The dot patterns from electrical discharges looked more intense in the direction of Florida than in the direction of Alabama. From hundreds of miles away, a strong pattern of electrical discharges appeared on the display to the south and a diffused pattern to the southwest.
I flew to a moment of truth near Augusta, Georgia. After the controller read a convective sigmet that called for embedded thunderstorms over the rest of my route, I consulted Flight Watch for how all this looked on radar. The area I was heading for was now almost completely covered with rain, with thunderstorms embedded within that rain. There were thunderstorms at Augusta, Macon, Georgia, and Dothan, which pretty well defined my route. By this time, I was flying in light turbulence and rain, and my radar was attenuating, meaning that all the energy was being reflected by the rain of the next 10 or so miles, and the radar was displaying nothing beyond that distance.
As much as I wanted to go on to Dothan and then Florida, I knew the current plan was no good. So when I switched back to the controller, I told him I wanted to go to Greer, South Carolina, 50 miles off to the right and out of the main rain area. Greer was reporting a 300-foot ceiling and a couple of miles visibility with light rain.
As I flew there, I had the feeling that something new was forming in the area. The air felt bothered, but while a Navajo pilot reported turbulence as moderate, it was really light.
On the ground at Greer, I contemplated the next step: Forgo Dothan and head straight for Florida. Trouble was, according to the FSS specialist, the weather was worse in that direction than it was toward Dothan — all solid rain with embedded thunderstorms.
When I set out that morning, I told myself that I was going to have a look because weather is often better than forecast. It can be worse than forecast, too, and that was the case this day. Shucks. I decided to just go back home, which turned out to be easier said than done.
All the forecasts in the Washington, D.C., area called for 400- to 700-foot ceilings and a couple of miles visibility. The reported weather was worse, but perhaps it would improve to the forecast. Then I thought about a lesson learned many times. When in the wintertime you get cold air under warm and the temperature difference is as great as it was this day — 10 degrees Celsius warmer at 6,000 feet than at the surface — those forecasts of improving weather are often inaccurate. Sometimes, it does not improve until a weather system comes along and churns up the atmosphere. Anyway, I filed a two-hour flight plan from Greer back to Winchester, with Columbus — more than a two-hour flight — as the alternate. Columbus was the closest legal alternate, and it was barely legal. I set out with my airplane awash with fuel — on a day like this, the only time you'd have too much fuel would be if the airplane were to catch fire.
Because there were frequent reports of ice in the higher cloud layer, I flew at 7,000 feet going back. It was the same eerie sight — flat cloud tops below with mountains protruding and a higher layer — with one difference. A continuous light chop jiggled the airplane for the first 150 miles.
I like to fly along and listen to ATIS broadcasts to learn what airports have landing minimums. Roanoke (Virginia) Regional was okay this day, with 400 feet. As I got closer to home, though, and could get the AWOS at Winchester, it reported bad news: 100 and one quarter. The same was true for nearby Frederick, Maryland. After I was in contact with Dulles Approach Control, which was not busy because airlines apparently were not dispatching many airplanes into the area, I got the controller to look at weather over the area. Hagerstown, Maryland, to the north of Winchester, had 200 and a half, minimums for its ILS approach. I started to head there when the controller volunteered Dulles. It was reporting 100 and a quarter, but the RVR was 2,600 feet, which constitutes minimums for the ILS approach.
The runways at Dulles are long and wide and the approach lighting systems the very best. Dulles was closer than Hagerstown, too, and who was to say that the Hagerstown weather would not deteriorate before I got there. I decided on the Dulles approach and was cleared into there without ado or delay.
I told myself when starting the approach that at least I had recent experience — the ILS at Greer — and indeed, this one seemed easy to fly. Trouble was, at the decision height, I did not see the approach lights. That means a missed approach and a new round of information- gathering. Then, before I had really started to climb, I saw the outline of the touchdown-zone lights through the murk. That meets all the requirements, so I went for it, landed, rented a car, and drove home only to reclaim my airplane the next day.
I learned, or relearned, a few weather lessons this day. Where the forecast had called for some severe embedded storms, apparently a lot of non-severe embedded thunderstorms cropped up. Dothan, for example, had three storms during the day; each lasted about an hour, with downpours, thunder, lightning, and not too much wind. The rest of the time, it just rained. The clue here was in the wind aloft: It was only about 20 knots from the southwest at 6,000 feet. That is hardly a wind that you find in advance of a vigorous weather system that spawns severe storms in the wintertime down south. In retrospect, though, I was pleased that I stayed out of the area. Avoiding the embedded storms would have been difficult with the radar attenuating and without well-defined patterns of lightning on the Stormscope. As much as I like the latter device, it should not be used to penetrate areas of thunderstorms.
Usually such an outbreak is limited in scope, and you can fly around the whole area, given the patience and fuel. I looked at The Weather Channel when I got home and saw that the area was huge — it covered the route to Florida with moderate rain and some heavy rain in the embedded storms. I think it was the biggest such area that I have seen. The only way for me to have dealt with it would have been to wait a day; doing that would have meant I missed what I was going for.
When making the decision to fly back home, I knew that the forecasts for improving weather might not come true. However, in almost five years of operating out of the Washington area and 23 out of the Philadelphia area, both of which have a lot of ILS-equipped airports, I have always thought that, with so many ILS approaches available, one of the airports will have minimums. This was the closest that ever came to not being true. It did indeed take me many years of flying to encounter this condition, but never again will I have the feeling that the weather will allow a landing somewhere close. I think that I made a mistake picking an alternate, too. When I based near Philly, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, would almost always work when the airports along the coast were socked in. The airport there is on top of a hill. Even though it is little more than an hour's flying away from the Washington area, I was thinking in terms of airports to the west when picking an alternate for this flight — Columbus.
So all I saw of the launch was on television. I could only imagine the sound and fury as the shuttle lifted gracefully from the pad, rolled, and then sped away to a successful mission. Someday.
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