Weather: Above the fray
Flying above an undercast
Most of what we’re taught in training is stripped down to its basics so the information can be easily conveyed. Overloading an airplane is bad. Using the full runway every time is good. The weather forecast for the lesson is good. Flying with less than full fuel is bad. Yet, like most things in life, reality exists in gray zones. Nowhere is this truer than weather, which is seldom perfect or terrible.
For this scenario you are flying a Cessna 172 from Arnold Palmer Regional Airport in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, to Northeast Philadelphia to give a speech to a group of high school kids. It’s 7 a.m. on a fall day, and the weather in Latrobe is one of those unusual perfectly excellent days, with clear skies, no wind, and unlimited visibility. However, just east of the city, and up until about 30 miles west of Philadelphia, METARs are showing visibilities of between a quarter mile and a half-mile, and ceilings of 200 feet or less. The destination is showing 5 miles visibility and scattered clouds at 1,200 feet.
The speech is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. According to the forecast, the fog along the route should start lifting at around 9 a.m., and the entire route is scheduled to be clear by 10:30 a.m. Do you:
Drive. If you leave now and get favorable traffic, you can most likely make the speech. It will be a tight timeline, and there could be fog along the Pennsylvania Turnpike that might slow you down.
Launch now. The departure and destination have decent weather, and the forecast shows both improving.
Delay to see what happens. The destination is marginal VFR, there are no emergency landing options along the route, and forecasts can be wrong. You have time to wait, and waiting will give you a chance to verify if the conditions are improving as forecast.
Call to cancel. Your options are limited, and you’ve boxed yourself into a corner by agreeing to do the speech by waiting until the morning to launch, knowing fall fog is a normal occurrence after a clear night in the Northeast.
Do it now
By Ian J. Twombly
This is a difficult call because the weather appears easily flyable, and driving isn’t a great option. You made a commitment, and have a strong desire to fulfill it. Assuming there are good VFR options even farther to the east I would launch now. The risk is that conditions don’t improve or get even worse at the destination. But if things remain clear to the east you might be able to land and still make it with a rental car. That said, a similar thing happened to me and I ended up missing the commitment because not only did the destination not improve, my alternate didn’t enable me to drive there. That was a difficult phone call to make, but still better than scud running and taking my chances.
I'll delay
By Kollin Stagnito
I’m going to delay a bit and confirm the fog is dissipating as expected. It’s a one-hour, 45-minute flight in the 172, so I could depart as late as 8:45 a.m. and still make it to Northeast Philly with an hour to spare. My concern is not so much the weather in Philadelphia, but rather flying over mountainous terrain with no place to land if anything goes wrong with the airplane—or me—since every airport along the route is currently below IFR minimums. Why leave now when delaying 90 minutes likely offers broken to scattered clouds along the entire route, trending toward clear skies? If the weather remains lousy all morning, I’m going to call and reschedule my speech for another day. I knew when I decided to fly my own airplane that a timely flight to make the speech would be weather dependent; I would also have told that to the event organizer.
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