First off, I would like to thank all of you who have followed me over the last year and a half. It means a lot to know that my friends and family follow my progress even if it isn't the most entertaining writing in the world. You could, after all, be reading Michael Crichton (I know I would rather be doing that!).
Weather at the beginning of December was frustrating. For almost two weeks straight, low clouds and fog sat over most of Central Florida and kept flying low. In times like these, we take advantage of the downtime and sit down with the students and discuss aerodynamics, weather, rules and regulations, and the like. We call these activities ground. The convenient thing about doing ground lessons is that the students here never seem to really get motivated to study. Oftentimes I'll ask the exact same questions four days in a row with similar incomplete answers. So, when bad weather moves in, I get to charge the students and help them study. Sometimes the students get to sit with me as a penalty for poor study habits outside of school but mostly we have to review upcoming oral testing by our check pilots.
After 4 straight days of fog (and I mean San Fran-like all-day fog), last Tuesday was looking to be more of the same. I was woken up by my alarm at 5:45 in the morning. I picked up my phone, silenced the alarm and as I'd done for the past two weeks straight, pulled up my weather app to check the previous Daytona Beach report. Thick fog blanketed the airport with visibilities less than 1/4 mile. To put this in perspective, the fog was so thick if you laid 4 football fields end-to-end, you wouldn't be able to see the end of the 4th one. If you were driving on the highway and driving 60 mph, you couldn't see anything in front of your car more than 15 seconds ahead. Thick.
I sighed or grunted or both and called up the weather reports from all the major airports in central Florida. Orlando International, Jacksonville, and even Tampa were all reporting fog. The forecast was promising the fog would clear out by 11 at the latest but low clouds would persist. Of course, my colleagues in another life said it was going to be clear all day the last 3 days but got those guesses wrong. I got dressed and jumped in my car in hopes that THIS time they would be right. As I was driving to New Smyrna, the fog appeared to get thicker. I was no longer comfortable driving at 55 mph and when I reached the airport, I couldn't see the tower which was positioned no more than 100 yards from the road. Great.
After canceling the first two flights of the day, sunshine filled the windows of the school. Just in time for my 11 am flight, I jumped up, found my student and told him to go pre-flight. We were going. Period. By the time we taxied to the runway, the sky to the south was clear and a beautiful shade of blue. As we climbed out of New Smyrna, I peaked back toward the north at Daytona and saw a low layer of clouds chilling. I snickered and thought some sarcastic comment about Embry-Riddle being grounded.
After about 45 minutes of practicing maneuvers, I looked back toward the airport merely 5-10 miles to the north of me and scattered clouds had filled the sky. Out to east over the water, it was clear. I made a mental note that if I needed to get under the clouds, that would be the way I could go. A straight shot in from the beach left no towers or buildings any higher than 300 feet. I was in a twin-engine airplane without GPS so an instrument approach would be impossible. I'd have to do it the old fashioned way. Of course, there was a sizable hole in the clouds over the land and south of the airport but its position put it in a precarious position near airspace that I didn't really want to have to enter and the end of the runway at New Smyrna.
I told my student to do one more maneuver and while he did that, I listened to the weather broadcast at the airport. They were reporting 1000 foot cloud bases barely making it legal to enter the airspace without a special instrument clearance. "Ok, let's go back. The clouds are getting low and I don't want to get trapped out here." As we flew back over the hole, I thought briefly that we should just circle down through it but didn't want to have to walk my student through the simple maneuver. It would just be easier to tell him to go out over the water to where there were clearly no clouds. "Go ahead and descend down to 1000 feet." As we reached the cloudless area over the Atlantic, I realized the cloud deck extended further out over the water than I thought. At 1000 feet, I couldn't see below the clouds. I told the student to descend to 800 feet to see if we could see below them at that altitude. Still couldn't get below them but I figured I could get down to 700 and be clear of clouds. On a special VFR clearance, I could make it to the airport as long as they didn't get any lower towards the coast. Knowing that I could potentially make the run to the coast at 500 feet (something I really didn't want to do), I remembered the hole. Plan B.
As my student oddly raced towards the cloud deck, I decided it would be my turn to fly. He appeared to be overly stressed by the situation and deciding to fly towards the clouds at nearly full power. "Ok, I'll take the controls for a minute." I pulled on the yoke and shot up at over 2000 feet per minute. As I climbed over the shallow cloud layer, I made my way to where I remembered the hole being. As I made my way inland, the hole had disappeared. "Bummer," I thought to myself. During this maneuver, I had heard tower talking to some guys to the west of the airport. They reported very low ceilings and poor visibility to the east out over the water. I knew this pretty much eliminated making my way back to the water in an attempt to get below the clouds. It sounded though as if another airport had found a hole.
As I maneuvered more north and west, I saw the hole but it was small and seemingly getting smaller. I needed no more than a mile-wide hole and my mental ruler was telling me it was a mile. I called tower and told them I was going to follow the Cessna through the hole. Unfortunately, we would be unable to descend normally because of the speed we would get to in order to lose enough altitude to fit through the hole. I dumped the gear, pulled the throttles to idle and pointed for the hole. At around 3000 feet per minute and over 140 mph, I watched my altimeter needles spin unnervingly fast. As we passed 1300 feet, the bases of the clouds rose above us and I could see the whole airport about a mile ahead.
I leveled off, added some power and gave the controls back to the student. "There, I did the hard part. All you have to do is land."
A few days later, I passed another milestone. My logbook total passed 1000 hours. If the experience and the knowledge I've gained in the first 1000 hours is any indication for what I will learn in the next 1000, I am in for quite another year!
No comments:
Post a Comment