A less than fun trip with some lessons relearned.

[N395V]

Normally I like to fly in the winter. Tops are not too high, the air is smooth and visibility (compared to summer down here) is crystal clear.

I had planned to fly from Souther Mississippi to Rockford Illinois last Thursday to look at a plane then home Friday as the long range forecasts looked good for Wednesday through Sunday.

Well Thursday morning this is what I woke up to......



Now I am sure to many of you this is no big deal but here in Southern Mississippi we just DO NOT EVER get 3 inches of snow. Even if I could have flown it would be unsafe to drive to the airport because down here people do not know how to drive in the snow.

In any event I left early the next morning. The weather patterns were really screwy. There was an inversion and the winds decreased with altitude and the temps increased as you went up. Unfortunately for me I was flying an underpowered pig and didn't have the oomph to get through the layer without picking up a ton of ice. So VFR at 2500' I went all the way to Chicago into 35 knot headwinds. What should have been 4 and 1/2 hours in the air turned in to 9 hrs.

You do not often get to actually see the frontal system with your own two eyes but today was rare.

Below you can actually see the warm air mass sliding over the cold front.


The first leg to Cape Girardeau Missouri (CGI) was slow but uneventful. Had to run the heater the entire way and was seeing a stellar 70 to 90 knots over the ground. Leaving the Cape I saw some holes I thought I could get through so I filed and was going to try to get to the warm air and slower winds on top. Nothing ever goes as planned and today was no different. On departure, departure kept me low for traffic for 10 minutes and I was in and out of the clouds picking up tons of ice so I cancelled IFR and went back down to 2500. The ice sublimated off rather quickly but the engines started to act funny. For the first time in 30 years I had to use carb heat.

About 20 minutes later the props got out of sync and when I tried to adjust them the levers wouldn't budge, the cables were frozen so I had 4 more hours of unsynchronized thrumming. Thank God the throttles didn't freeze. Lesson learned (relearned ice gets inside as well as outside, and carb heat is useful)

Got to Rockford and it was gosh awful cold. did my flight planning home and you guessed it the front has moved far enough that I will have headwinds going home and similar met conditions so home I go at 2700 feet. The winds at 3000' were 56 knots just about off my nose. The resultant ground speed was


That was my best speed all the way back to CGI took 4:45, it can be driven quicker. Called it a day and spent the night at CGI.

cntd next post.............................................. .................

[DeltaRomeo]

Milt,

I'm cold just reading that. Thanks for the write-up.

b,
dr

[jimpappas]

Milt,

Welcome to the ice box!

I live an hour by ground and less than that by RV from Rockford.

You know it's cold when the dogs go out and are back inside in less than 2 minutes!

Try to stay warm.

[N395V]

Next morning no change in the weather or winds but we headed for home anyway. Speed was a bit better but now we had widely scattered snow and rain showers to contend with.
Looking out in front as I worked around Memphis class B was this rain shower that I ended up going through. As you can see in the photo below it is dead ahead and straddles the interstate below.

Now what is interesting here is not the shower it self but what it looks like and where it is relative to the nexrad image that is only 2 minutes old when I snapped this photo...


Clearly the showers have moved a long way in the 2 minute period. The nexrad was nice in that I knew the shower was only about a mile thick but it certainly wasn't where you would have expected it.

The above photo is an image from a Flight Cheetah 190 and points out some features that were really helpful on this trip.

Note the little colored Ls near airports. These are graphic metars that represent ceiling, visibility, and report age. A green vertical leg means a ceiling greater than 3,000 feet and vfr, the horizontal is visibility green being gretaer than 3 miles. Yellow means marginal and red IFR. The color of the identifier green is recent yellow greater than 30 minutes old and red greater than 1 hr. Above the L it denotes precipitation, NP=none R=rain SN=snow.

It also does a great job depicting and color coding towers. Did flight following both ways through Houston,KC,Memphis,and St Louis centers as well as Jackson, Memphis, Peoria, and Rockford approach. All very pleasant and very helpful with the exception of St Louis center who I won't criticize as they were clearly overwhelmed with traffic.
Now you may ask why would i make this trip and was it worth it. Well judge for yourself.

This will soon be plying the Mississippi skies.




I really didn't want it but she made me do it.

[Mike S]

Finally did it huh

Good thing fuel prices have come down a bit.

How is the RR coming along??

[turbosaaber]

cold start warm ending....congrats on your new addition...

[N395V]

Originally Posted by Mike S

Finally did it huh

Good thing fuel prices have come down a bit.

How is the RR coming along??

Yeah,
They made me a deal I couldn't refuse. The RR is almost done just some sanding then to the paint shop and out to the airport. The T 28 is primarily to have something to work on. Although it is in excellent condition no matter how low fuel gets I really can't afford to fly it very often.

[TSwezey]

Beautiful!

[Mike S]

Originally Posted by N395V

I really didn't want it but she made me do it.

Yeah, right.

[David-aviator]

Originally Posted by N395V

This will soon be plying the Mississippi skies.

Don't even remember how to start the beast, but the T-28 was our second airplane in USAF aviation cadet class 60-F. (The first airplane was the T-34 for about 30 hours.)

Man, that machine seemed huge to us neophyte aviators, many of us not yet old enough to buy a drink. But it turned out to be not too difficult to fly once you got over the fact you were actually there and learning to do it. We spent half a day in ground school and on a physical training field, and half a day flying, five days (or nights) a week.

I do remember the engine was quirky to start in that if you did not get the procedure right, it back fired and the flight was delayed until a mechanic inspected the exhaust system. The loud bang was very embarrassing for anyone who screwed it up and could be heard by everyone on the flight line and always caused a royal chewing out by the instructor. That was one screw up I did not make but there were plenty of others. In this phase of training, all the IP's were civilian, most of them former WWII combat pilots who were very short fused over any screw up. The school, Hawthorn Aviation, was owned by Bevo Howard. I guess he was an OK guy but he sure hired grouchy instructors.

The T-28 is very stable in flight. Control response was not exactly light but it was no slouch either. We did positive G aerobatics early on as in the T-34. The program was such that you learned your stuff quick or you were out just as quickly. Two thirds of the class did not make the cut or SIEed (self-initiated-elimination).

Some of the success of staying was pure luck. On my final check ride in the T-34 the airplane stalled on top of a loop. It immediately dropped out and I had no idea what to do so I just let go of the controls to see what would happen - the trusty 34 dropped its nose, rolled wings level and began flying at which point I grabbed the stick again. The check pilot commented over inter phone "great recovery". I did not utter a word except whew to myself. The check pilots were frequently military officers and not as grouchy as the civilian guys.

Another quirky thing about the T-28 engine (an early 7 cylinder radial) is it would quit on top of a loop. Our flight instructor briefed us not to sweat it, the thing always started going down on the back side, which it did. All just part of the program.

We got about 80 hours total in the 28, maybe a third solo and the rest with an IP doing basic maneuvers and under the hood. There was a lot of stuff crammed into a short curriculum including solo night cross country which always involved someone getting lost and landing at some civilian field to get reorientated and wait for an IP to rescue him. There were stories galore about this and we found some comfort in that it was the foreign exchange students who mostly got lost. Some of the students at the time were from the Middle East and descendants of wealthy families and could not be washed out, they just stayed indefinitely until someone passed them and they went home, for better or worse. The sharpest foreign guys were from Germany, they knew how to fly before coming over. Anyway, back to the night cross country, the IP's would be up in mother ships orbiting the check points along the route trying to keep us dummies on the route and talking to guys not on the route. It did not take long to figure out that if it looked like you were on the route on your map AND you could see the guys ahead of you, things worked out. We took off about 3 minutes apart so a clear night you could see at least 2 guys ahead of you.

Man, that was a long time ago, like 50 years. It doesn't seem that long but I guess it is so.

I'm sure you will enjoy the airplane, Milt. North American never built an airplane pilots did not like.