Waypoints

The plan was simple enough: Get home. We had all day to do it if necessary — complete flexibility. Sporting a new pair of wingtip fuel tanks, our Beech A36 Bonanza could make the 750-nautical-mile journey from Orlando to our home base at Frederick, Maryland, nonstop.

Pilot Associate Editor Pete Bedell and I were in Orlando attending the Aircraft Electronics Association annual convention. After seeing all of the latest avionics gear, including some impressive weather detection and display systems, our plan was to head northward that Thursday afternoon. In typical general aviation fashion, we were prepared to leave Thursday morning if that looked like a better weather option. The weather forecasts Wednesday afternoon and evening did not look promising. Severe thunderstorms were moving across the Southeast. In fact, the storms spawned deadly tornadoes in Alabama and Georgia that night. The Southeast is unique, in that, given the right conditions, the all-American weather phenomenon we call "tornadoes" can crop up at any time of the day or night. Night tornadoes in the Great Plains and Ohio River Valley — other areas known for producing these powerful storms — are unusual. The rapid cooling associated with sunset deprives severe storms of the lifting action necessary to produce tornadoes. However, the ground and atmosphere in the warm, humid Southeast apparently retain enough energy to keep these mega thunderstorms growing, even after dark.

By Thursday morning, the tornado watch areas had been moved eastward over Georgia and South Carolina as the storms rapidly moved toward the coast. A strong cold front arced from a low over Ohio and Pennsylvania across the Southeast into the Gulf of Mexico. With big red boxes on the weather charts blocking our route, the no-go decision was easy. We went back to the exhibit hall to see some more black boxes.

We resumed our weather watching at about 11 a.m. to find that the storms were indeed moving off the coast, leaving scattered to broken clouds in the Southeast. Meanwhile, another low over Indiana was marching eastward, promising to make our arrival into the Washington, D.C., area interesting. It looked good at least into North Carolina. We decided to launch for home, with a plan to stop in the Carolinas if things up north went, well, south. Ferocious winds out of the southwest promised to make it a quick trip.

Climbing out of Kissimmee Municipal Airport just southwest of Orlando, we passed through some scattered cumulus clouds and soon leveled off in the clear at 9,000 feet. A cooperative controller at Jacksonville Center allowed us to cut the corner and fly direct to Brunswick VOR on the Georgia coast instead of the planned route over Ocala and Gainesville to Jacksonville and then up the coast. A barometric pressure of 29.76 inches seemed normal enough, if a little low. The winds were as strong as forecast, but instead of being out of the south southwest, they were more westerly, giving us a hefty correction angle that ate away at our groundspeed. A 10- to 15-knot push is always nice, but it is a bit disappointing when you're expecting 25. Still, we managed 180 to 185 knots early in the trip. That speed seemed particularly good when we spoke on the air-to-air frequency with the pilot of a southwest-bound Cessna Conquest at Fight Level 200 that was managing only 170 knots of groundspeed while truing at better than 250 knots.

At 9,000, our KLN 90B GPS calculated the wind at 90 to 95 knots out of 260 degrees. Hoping for a little more help, we climbed to 11,000 feet, only to find the winds there at 80 knots out of 270 degrees — yielding just a two-knot tailwind. But the ride was good with only scattered clouds well below us. The Stormscope showed no dots along our route. As we reached southern Georgia, we could see the massive storms off the coast — both visually and on the Stormscope. It was about then that flight service announced a tornado watch in effect along a line 110 miles wide from Richmond to Greensboro; our route bisected the line. Meanwhile, the pressure was dropping rapidly. By the time we reached North Carolina, the tornado watch had expired despite the fact that the pressure had plummeted to 29.46 inches. A few cells began to show up on the Stormscope as the cloud tops climbed to meet us.

A controller near Fayetteville, North Carolina, gave us a new baro reading of 29.34 inches. "It's a little crazy around here, so we're not using Flight Level 180 today," he advised a Beech King Air that was asking for that altitude. The wide pressure differential between the local setting and the standard setting of 29.92 inches in the flight levels meant that an aircraft flying VFR at 17,500 feet with a local altimeter setting might actually conflict with an aircraft at FL180 using the standard setting.

Although the strong winds were not helping our groundspeed, they were aiding us in another way. Just north of Fayetteville, we saw a developing cell with a top of about 15,000 feet. But within a few minutes the high winds knocked the top right off it, leaving an anvil of virga to the east of the cell, a sure sign that it would not be growing into any super storm that could spawn a tornado.

Just north of Raleigh, North Carolina, with about an hour of flying left, we were still fat with fuel. The new tip tanks, which hold 15 gallons each, increase endurance by almost two hours and improve versatility. Empty, they provide a net maximum gross weight increase of 183 pounds — giving the Bonanza payload for four adults and reasonable endurance on the stock 74 gallons. The tip tanks can provide the higher max gross weight because the tanks actually increase the wingspan slightly. The greater wingspan lowers the stall speed enough that, even at the higher weight, the airplane still stalls below the mandatory 61 knots for a single-engine airplane.

With only a couple of people to carry, you can use the newfound payload for fuel. With 104 gallons available, the Bonanza's endurance increases to more than six hours with generous reserves. So 3.5 hours into the flight, with Raleigh sliding by below us and the GPS reporting another hour to go, we were confident that a stop would not be necessary as long as the weather didn't hold any surprises.

Things at home were looking up. The observations at Dulles International and Martinsburg, West Virginia, were showing visibilities greater than six miles and scattered layers from 2,500 to 8,000 feet. Winds, though, were out of 260 degrees at 15 knots gusting to 23.

As is typical, Dulles controllers sent us northwestward when we wanted to go home — northeast. We were in the clear, but threatening clouds were moving in from the west — the morning's Indiana storms. Would we get a turn before entering the dark clouds?

When it became convenient for him, the controller finally turned us to the northeast — well outside of not only the Washington Class B, but also the 30-nautical-mile Mode C veil. Pete tuned in the Frederick AWOS to hear only a carrier. A call to unicom brought the report that lightning an hour earlier had knocked the system off the air. The man with the mechanical voice in the little box out by the runway had taken a direct lightning hit. As we descended through a few scattered clouds, evidence of the day's rain showed up in the form of muddy streams out of their banks and flooded farm fields there in the shadow of the Catoctin Mountains. We spotted the runway from miles away and canceled IFR. Despite the gusting wind, Pete guided the Bonanza to a nice landing on Runway 30 — 4.8 hours after we had left Kissimmee. At a conservative cruise power setting, nearly two hour's worth of fuel still sloshed around in the tanks.

A telephone call to my wife at her office to coordinate who was picking up the kids was met with the query: "Where are you?" A decade of my flying around the continent in general aviation airplanes has taught her to always ask, but this time there was definite puzzlement on how we had made it home. "We just had a dreadful storm pass through an hour ago. We were all looking for a place to hide. How did you make it in?"

Clean living, I guess. Or was it careful planning, a capable airplane, and a flexible schedule? The latter, I like to believe.

The pretty afternoon behind the first front quickly turned dark and overcast. As I pulled in the driveway at home, the rains started again. The weather from the west had arrived. Our weather day was not yet over — such is general aviation flying in the springtime.