Waypoints

Editor in Chief Tom Haines has been making instrument cross-country flights for more than a dozen years.

Everyone seems to agree that one of the biggest challenges facing general aviation these days is getting weather information into the cockpit. Great strides are in process, but there's also the challenge of managing preflight weather information. These days, with The Weather Channel and the Internet, getting the information needed to plan a flight isn't nearly as much of a problem as it used to be. Today, the issue is sorting and processing the information. I've always used the flight service station briefers as aides, even when I have access to a cadre of other weather sources to study in advance of the call. Most of the time the briefers are a great help. Sometimes, though, they — in the interest of safety — can steer you wrong.

I went to bed Saturday night with the expectation that the trip from Frederick, Maryland, to Wichita on Sunday would go without much of a weather hitch. A call to flight service early Sunday changed my mind. What was forecast on Saturday to be a rather benign cold front stretching from northeast to southwest through the Ohio River Valley had turned — on Sunday — into a strong line of thunderstorms with tops stretching to 40,000 feet. The briefer all but told me I couldn't get there from here. "You'd have to go way down south to even think about getting around it — almost to Memphis," he reported.

Memphis. That doesn't sound all that far out of the way. I've made bigger diversions than that lots of times, I thought.

After talking to the briefer I did what I should have done first: I flipped on The Weather Channel. Sure enough, the Ohio River Valley looked like a quilt of green, yellow, and red. Another line was forming to the southwest over Alabama and Mississippi. But wouldn't a southwesterly track toward Memphis keep me in the clear and then perhaps I could duck westward between the lines? If the lines joined up, I would have to wait it out somewhere en route. Weather behind the front looked just fine.

I checked some Internet weather sites and used my flight planner to examine a couple of possibilities and called flight service back. This briefer concurred that the plan looked doable. I filed the flight plan and shortly thereafter took off into 30-knot headwinds. Flying into West Virginia, I entered the clouds and was soon in light to occasionally moderate rain, but the ride was mostly smooth. The Stormscope didn't show any lightning in the vicinity. Flight watch confirmed that only showers lay ahead for the next couple of hundred miles.

With 30 to 35 knots of headwind component, I was planning a fuel stop not long after I took off. I had filed for McKellar-Sipes Regional Airport in Jackson, Tennessee, located between Nashville and Memphis. My hope was that the storms would move to the north enough by the time I got there so I could land at Jackson for fuel and then go west to Wichita.

The winds were stronger than forecast and right from the start I wasn't optimistic about making Jackson. I learned long ago that the only thing that matters in instrument flying is what is actually happening in the atmosphere as you're passing through it, so you better be prepared to deal with whatever comes along. Changing planned fuel stops is something to get good at.

I've used London, Kentucky, many times as an escape from impending weather, but this time I really wanted to get a bit farther, hoping that I could still make it to Wichita with only one fuel stop. Flight watch advised that to get around the weather I might have to go as far south as Huntsville or Muscle Shoals, Alabama. I didn't have the fuel for that. So with weather moving in from the west and some advice from flight watch, I passed over London and then diverted farther south to Crossville, Tennessee, home of Trade-A-Plane. The Stormscope showed some thunderstorms just west of town. The ILS to Runway 26 kept me well away from the storms. But a few minutes after I landed, the skies opened up with a real ramp washer.

The radar on the FBO's Meteorlogix machine showed the storms just west of the airport moving mostly north with very little other activity to the south. I sat in the pilot's lounge and ate my brown-bag lunch while watching the rain. Within 45 minutes it brightened to the west. Another check of weather showed that the storms had moved northeast, leaving a clear path to the west. The storms over Alabama had mostly dissipated.

After that refreshing break, I was westbound at 10,000 feet on top of the remnants of the weather system. The headwind didn't let up all day, but I still made Wichita without another stop, landing into strong surface winds that nearly blew the door off the airplane when I tried to open it at the FBO.

Even with the headwind and the diversion to the south, I still made the trip faster than the airlines could carry me, and I was free to come and go on my own schedule.

Like every other decision relating to a flight, the go/no-go decision should rest with the pilot, and we shouldn't abdicate that to anyone. The first briefer that morning wanted to throw in the towel for me. I can do that for myself — and have many times. But sometimes a little strategy can make into reality what at first looks like an impossible trip.

E-mail the author at [email protected].