Waypoints

Few things in life are universal, and one of the first things you learn in Writing 101 at journalism school is to be careful when using definitives, such as always and never. So, Dr. Swauger, if you’re reading this, please withhold judgment.

Here goes: You’ll never climb into an airplane with the intention of flying it without having made some sort of weather-related decision.

Stunning revelation, I know.

But, you’re saying, what about those perfectly glorious evenings when you jump into the airplane to fly a couple of touch and goes—never bothering to consult with the weather guessers? Your decision then was to not consult with the weather guessers. You looked at the sky, carefully planned your route around the pattern, and decided that nothing untoward on the horizon would zap you out of existence in the time it would take you to make a couple of circuits.

Of course, life is usually (always?) more complicated than that, especially when it comes to cross-country flying. In fact, weather decision making is one of the most important skills a pilot must learn—and one of the most difficult to teach. If we could wave a magic wand and grant every pilot an additional frontal lobe chockablock with weather knowledge and experience, we’d slash the fatal accident rate mightily.

Sometimes you get to make weather decisions while still on the ground, but often you’re faced with changing conditions in flight. At that point, you must be willing to chuck whatever you were told during the preflight briefing in favor of what you see out the window.

The first half of a recent flight from Maryland to Florida was stuffed with in-flight weather decisions, but fortunately, I knew before taking off what I was getting into.

A slow-moving cold front stretched from Virginia to the Gulf Coast. Predictably, it sparked severe thunderstorms as it moved into the humid Southeast. On the day of my departure, the moderate rain ahead of the northern edge of the front was still west of our route. To the south, lines of thunderstorms were marching toward the coast—right in our path.

I filed an IFR flight plan early in the morning, intending to launch in time to get through the Carolinas and Georgia before the storms got to the coast. The problem was that we would need to make a fuel stop somewhere in that region, and I didn’t relish the idea of an approach in an area of convection.

At the FBO just prior to heading out to the airplane, I checked the radar display one last time and it became obvious that we weren’t going to be able to go down the coast and stay ahead of the storms; they had moved too far eastward. However, there appeared to be a break in the line near Roanoke, Virginia. If we could dash through the Level One and Two showers, we could get behind the front and make it easily to Florida. A quick call to flight service verified the plan. There was no convection in that area and only rain behind the front. We could expect only scattered clouds by the time we got into South Carolina, west of the front.

In the airplane, I called clearance delivery with the intent of picking up our filed route down the coast and then negotiating for a more westerly route once in the air. Unfortunately, air traffic control attempted to send us east over Baltimore and then south, quite literally down the coast—a route well east of even what I had originally planned. I refused the clearance and asked for something closer to what I had filed. Eventually, the controller came back with a routing that would take us down the west side of the Washington, D.C., area and then southward.

We took off and were soon in the clouds. The rain started shortly after we turned southwestward. A call to flight watch showed that the area near Roanoke was still convection-free. In fact, the specialist suggested, we could even head a little more southerly to Lynchburg, Virginia, instead of Roanoke, which is farther to the west. From Lynchburg, he proposed a route south to Greensboro and then to Charlotte, with the caution that we should not go east of Charlotte. South of Charlotte, we should be out of the worst of the weather, he advised. So, grateful for the advice, we signed off and went back over to ATC, where we asked for and were given the reroute. And it worked out just fine. Near Charlotte, ATC wanted us to go east of Charlotte to stay away from its busy airline hub. Mindful of the flight service specialist’s advice, I asked the controller about the conditions east of Charlotte. Only moderate rain, he replied. I dialed up flight watch again for another opinion, and he agreed that by now the convection had moved east of Charlotte and we were fine going due south from Greensboro.

Near Charlotte, though, the bumps really started as we trundled through the cold front. Meanwhile, the headwinds had picked up. Throughout the flight, we endured 35- to 40-knot headwind penalties, meaning we wouldn’t comfortably make our planned fuel stop in the Savannah area. So I opted for Columbia, South Carolina, which is south of Charlotte. By the time we landed for fuel, the sun was out. The second leg to central Florida proved as uneventful as the first leg was eventful.

So a flight that at one point had looked almost impossible turned out to be fairly easy with the help of flight service and ATC, and the willingness to ditch one plan in favor of another.

When weather flying, remember to always have an out and to never think that the plan you take off with is the one you must fly. And be careful of those definitives.