Into the soup

Five years later, my company relocated us to Tucson, Arizona, and a new job, new wife, and new house tightened those time and money constraints further, so that flying became a fond memory until I retired 24 years after the move. Then, to keep this engineer’s brain from atrophying, I got back into flying. Renting became a hassle, so I bought my very first airplane, a 1999 Mooney Ovation. The airplane is hangared at Tucson International (TUS), a Class C airport, partly to force me to overcome my shyness in speaking to ATC. Two years later, and after some serious panel upgrades, I got my instrument rating. Barely. It took two tries to pass the checkride. Of course, living in Tucson offers few opportunities to fly real IFR, except in the summer when IMC is thunderstorms; and in the winter when freezing levels are low.

One May, six months after getting my instrument rating, my wife and I were in Des Moines, Iowa, to attend the funeral of a cousin. Despite the somber occasion, I looked forward to my first chance to fly some serious cross-country, as well as the potential to fly real IFR. As they say, be careful what you wish for.

On the morning of departure for the return home, ceilings at Des Moines International Airport (DSM) were 200 feet with one-mile visibility. Ceilings were predicted to lift to 700 feet by the afternoon, but a weather front moving in along our route of flight would make for a very uncomfortable ride if we waited. And if we waited for that weather front to pass, we’d be there another week. What the heck? I’m instrumented-rated!

By the time I’d completed my preflight, ceilings had risen to 300 feet, and visibility increased somewhat. At this point, I should have been asking myself if I’d be comfortable landing in these conditions if something went wrong, but I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to hear the answer. So, off we went into the soup.

My new autopilot, a Garmin GFC 500, is amazing. But engagement below 800 feet is prohibited—and, frankly, dumb—if in IMC. If something unexpected happens, there is precious little altitude or time to disengage the autopilot, possibly recover from an unusual attitude, and transition the brain to hand-flying the airplane. So, per my training, my eyes were locked onto the attitude indicator as we took off. Poof, visibility went to zero. No worries, instruments showed us in a wings-level climb. Eyes were focused on the AI with brief excursions to airspeed, altimeter, and HSI.

Just then, a loud and frantic beeping over the headset and a flashing light in my peripheral vision sent my self-confidence into a graveyard spiral. I thought...well, never mind what I thought. My wife gets panicky when I express those kinds of thoughts, so I just said, “I wonder what that is?” in as calm, confident, and nonchalant a voice as I could muster. I mean, I had to acknowledge that something unexpected had happened, right? In the spirit of a sterile cockpit, my wife had considerately moved the mic away from her mouth so that her hyperventilating, gasps, and curses would not become a further distraction. She hates IMC on a good day.

At this point, I did my first smart thing. I refused to let the alarm distract me from flying the airplane. After all, the engine sounded normal, we were still climbing, we were on our assigned heading, and a brief glance at the JP Instruments EDM 930 showed no red. A few seconds later (it seemed like an eternity), the alarm went quiet. Did whatever was broken fix itself? Would the issue return before I could get into clearer weather and focus on engine instruments to troubleshoot this? What could it have been? I had plenty to think about on our flight to Rapid City.

I began to suspect what happened and I confirmed it when I got home. I have a digital voice recorder, designed to record lectures, but with a line input. It serves as a poor man’s cockpit voice recorder when plugged into a spare headphone jack, and it provides a useful aide in reviewing ATC communications and the flight. The recording at the time of the alarm was a perfect match for an inner marker signal, something I’d never heard before in real life, but which the ILS approach to Runway 31 at Des Moines has—we took off on Runway 13, so encountered the inner marker when well into our climb over the departure end of the 9,000-foot runway

Lessons learned? A quick perusal of the terminal procedures publication would have shown the inner marker and eliminated that surprise. However, this was a wake-up call. Had this been a real emergency, it would have required a landing barely above minimums, and way below my personal minimums for this relatively inexperienced, instrument-rated pilot. But I wanted to get home. I wanted to check off a couple more states by sticking to my planned northern route. If I’d waited, it surely wouldn’t have been for a week, although I might have had to choose a different route home. Regardless, better to spend a week in Des Moines rather than a week in the hospital—or worse. My new personal takeoff minimums include being able to (legally) engage the autopilot before entering IMC. At least that will reduce my workload so that I can deal with the unexpected. Afterall, a three-second scan of the panel would have shown that the flashing light was the inner marker.

Rod Callison is a retired electronics engineer, who spent his 38-year career in the defense industry. He is a private pilot with more than 800 hours and nearly 5 hours of actual instrument flying.