Waypoints: Putting Weather Tech to Work

He cleared me direct to our destination, Lakeland, Florida, with a climb to 9,000 feet. But the magenta line on the moving map quickly showed that was not going to work. Most of southwestern Florida was a brooding mass of green, yellow, and red, and the magenta line went right through it. Crystal clear in the Keys, we could see towering clouds miles ahead, many lighting up in the darkening sky. I asked the controller for a routing northeast toward Homestead near Miami and then northwest to Lakeland, hoping to end run the slow-moving mass. But even that looked iffy, based on the XM WX radar showing on the Beechcraft Bonanza’s multifunction display. Studying the display a bit more and poking around on the iPad, I determined a better route might be up the west coast of the peninsula, as the storms were just onshore and slowly moving east.

The controller helpfully approved my request to the Cypress VOR and then to Sarasota before turning toward Lakeland. The route and altitude kept us in visual conditions—always a good goal, especially at night with weather around. As the night darkened, the show really started with towering clouds just east of us continuously flashing like some 1970s disco scene. As we settled in for the 90-minute flight I was again—as I frequently am—in awe of the technology available to us for instrument flight in the twenty-first century. With the satellite-delivered Nexrad and L3 Stormscope on the MFD side of the Garmin G500 and on the Garmin GTN 750 navigator, and with a Garmin FlightStream 510 pumping the radar out to the Pilot app on the iPad, I was immersed in helpful information, frequently checking METARs along the way for wind speed, barometric pressure changes, and temperature/dew point spreads.

As one who earned an instrument rating nearly 30 years ago, I flew around in weather for 15 years with nothing but Flight Watch and hope—feeling lucky once in a while to have a Stormscope. I’d plow into a dark cloud, hoping that my last report from Flight Watch was still accurate and that ATC was looking out for me. The amazing thing is, it all worked pretty well—but, geez, the angst of not knowing.

While extremely helpful, in-cockpit radar images, whether via satellite or FIS-B, are a strategic, not a tactical tool. Some can be as many as 15 minutes old and a lot can happen in a storm in 15 minutes (see “Proficiency: Into the WILD,” page 86). But this night, we could clearly see the line between visual and instrument conditions and were easily able to stay on the visual side.

Rounding the bend at Sarasota, we had a clear shot to Lakeland, as the storms had moved southeast.

Advances in weather technology are not confined to the cockpit. A few weeks later, looking to head back to Frederick, Maryland, from the AOPA Fly-In at Tampa, it was dramatic improvements in preflight planning tools that helped me complete a flight that 18 hours earlier I was convinced would not happen. An unusual series of low pressure systems, a cold front, and a couple of troughs along the East Coast had forecasters flummoxed that weekend. On Saturday morning I had made up my mind that I would not be going home Sunday because of the forecast for convection and heavy wind, rain, and turbulence along the route and the possibility of icing. But as Saturday progressed, the Sunday forecasts improved. Saturday evening I dove into the Aviation Weather Center’s amazing new forecast tools for convection, turbulence, and icing. The Graphical Turbulence Guidance and graphical icing forecast tools are especially impressive. The tools suggested the freezing levels would be above me along the coast and turbulence would not be as bad as originally forecast. The convection forecasts went away completely. I went to bed thinking I might make it home Sunday after all.

Sunday morning, the forecasts were turning out to be accurate. I took off and with 35 to 40 knots of tailwind zoomed to a fuel stop in South Carolina in clear skies, where I checked weather again. A couple of hours later I was touching down in Frederick after dodging rain showers, but hardly getting wet. As forecast, an hour later the airport was below minimums in mist and heavy rain.

Flying on the gauges still suffers no fools, but flying blind is not as foolish as it once was.

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