Unusual Attitude: Fly, don’t drive

During many years of flying almost exclusively single-engine piston airplanes—most of them limited to VFR—it’s astonishing how seldom my trips get canceled for weather or mechanical reasons. Am I just lucky and clear skies appear magically whenever I file a flight plan? Hardly. Do I take foolish risks when it comes to flying in adverse conditions? No. By simply keeping an eye on the weather forecast in the days leading up to a trip and being flexible with departure times and routes, things often work out. And despite the old saw that it’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air than in the air wishing you were on the ground, when I do cancel trips, I often regret doing so.

Recently, I planned to give two colleagues a ride to Stewart, New York, to pick up an airplane. But 24 hours before our scheduled departure, the weather forecast was so dismal that I pulled the plug. A winter cold front was expected to cross the Appalachians at the same time as us, bringing powerful winds, turbulence, icing conditions, and low IFR on both ends. Yuck. Canceling seemed like the obvious right choice. When I woke up the next morning, however, the skies were clear and the surface winds were calm. The front was moving slower than predicted, and the three-hour round trip would have been easily doable.

My colleagues and I were able to regroup. I filed an IFR flight plan and made the trip to Stewart and back and saw only fleeting glimpses of the insides of clouds, and no ice.

Another needless flight cancellation took place on a relatively short summertime trip with my son, then a young teen. I took him in my two-seat RV–4 to ride rollercoasters at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, and all was going well until unanticipated late-afternoon thunderstorms brought soaking rain to the region. We waited for the skies to clear, but rain and lightning persisted until the FBO’s closing time. Finally, I gave up and rented a car. Predictably, the skies parted just 10 miles away from the airport, rainbows appeared, and we arrived home in glorious, maddening sunshine. (It was just as clear and calm the next day when I made the return trip in the rental car and retrieved the airplane.)

My best-ever assignment at AOPA was campaigning the AOPA sweepstakes aircraft—a VFR-only Aviat Husky that cruised at about 102 knots—around the country in 2012 before it was handed over to its winner. I took it to Key West, Florida; coastal Maine; Montana; and California—and had a blast. XM satellite weather allowed the safe completion of multiple trips that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

No pilot is immune from getting stuck. I logged a couple of nights on Southeast Aero Sales Director Doug Vayda’s couch when thunderstorms sealed off the Florida peninsula before ferrying an Extra 300 from St. Augustine to Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve done the dreaded 180-degree turnback in Alaska when low clouds in the Lake Clark Pass stymied my attempt to fly through that majestic area on the way south. I had a part fail in remote Alaska, and I’ve had to abandon the coastal route to the Lower 48 in favor of better weather inland.

Long, continent-spanning trips can be easier to complete than short ones because localized areas of bad weather are sometimes easier to avoid. But not always. On a winter ferry flight in a Cessna 152 from Wyoming to Maryland, I stopped for the night at Fort Wayne, Indiana, only to be grounded the next morning by freezing fog that didn’t lift until long after every other airport in the region had cleared. By the time I finally got going, however, a booming tailwind carried me the rest of the way home (370 nautical miles) without stopping—not bad for the tiny trainer.

The moral of this story is simply not to give up too soon. Stack the deck in your favor by scheduling trips around favorable forecasts. Use safety-enhancing tools such as in-cockpit weather to plan and modify routes. And show up at the airport at the appointed time. You’ll be amazed at how often you can fly instead of drive.FT