Ed_Wischmeyer
Well Known Member
So the plan was to fly from Savannah, GA, to Cedar Rapids, IA, to visit old (and getting older) friends before change made it impossible. Summer weather in the southeast makes such trips easier to cancel than to actually fly.
Surprisingly, the weather on the first leg was forecast to be pretty good, although I waited for some very low IFR to burn off a bit -- a Gulfstream pilot friend doesn’t fly his single engine plane over ceilings less than 1,000 feet in case the engine quits. I went IFR at 6,000 on the first leg, as that let me climb through the clouds without looking for a big enough hole, and it got me into cooler air.
Although it was early, I got a really good burger at Shifters near D73 in north Georgia. When I told the lady I was flying to Iowa, she asked if I was going to drive down to Atlanta and catch a flight. Oh. As the conversation evolved, she said that she had once flown on a thirty seat plane which she described as a “crop duster.” Ahem.
For the next leg, I filed IFR direct at 8,000. My physiology, for whatever reason, wants oxygen much lower than other folks’, but I was ready, and had everything plugged in and tested before takeoff. As the picture shows, the second leg was not direct in any real sense of the word. At 8,000 feet, I was mostly skimming the tops of the cumulus clouds (bases around 3,500 feet), and could usually see the ground somewhere around me.
When I did go through a cloud, tops at nine or ten, it was a ride, but doable. I would usually turn off the autopilot to get additional experience in hand flying. Each bump was a minor upset, and being able to change frequencies while doing that was a minor, a very minor, triumph. The workload was high enough hand-flying the plane that there weren’t very many brain cycles left over for anything else.
On the second leg, there were a few serious storms directly on my route, tops in the mid-forties (really serious storms) so the question was whether to zig around them to the north or to the south. The radar showed a number of measles splotches forming on the southern zig, with great potential for forming an impenetrable line, so I zagged to the north.
On that northern zag, there I went through a few buildups, maybe to ten thou or so, that gave me a >ride<. The workload was high and although the bumps weren’t that bad, the up and downdrafts were beyond my ability to hold altitude within 100 feet.
Then came another cloud, with friskiness that I didn’t see coming, updrafts and downdrafts, bumps being the least of my concerns. It was beyond my ability to keep the plane anywhere near where I wanted it to be, so I turned on the autopilot. To my surprise, the Garmin G3X autopilot did an excellent, incredible, unbelievably good job of holding altitude and, at one point, recovering seemingly immediately from a gust-induced 30 degree bank. (Having given credit were credit is due, there are other things that the autopilot doesn’t do nearly as well as I can do hand-flying, annoyances that I think would be easy to fix. Then again, talk is cheap…)
And when time finally came to descend to the airport, IFR made it easy as I didn’t have to find a big enough hole.
So what’s the takeaway, at least for me:
• IFR in cumulus clouds of any size can be challenging;
• The autopilot is a go/no-go item for me, even though I will not attempt a flight that I think I can’t hand-fly;
• Even the seemingly large deviations added little flight time. And the least fuel reserve I had on any leg was two hours;
• Don’t fly IFR around cumulus clouds if you can’t see what you might be going through. On the third leg, I started the diversion maybe 50 miles away, based on what I could see. And a visual picture is worth so much more than uplinked NEXRAD or center advisories on what their radar sees.
Could I have made this trip VFR? Probably, bouncing along in hot, humid weather under the clouds, avoiding rain shafts and ugly looking clouds. And with GPS, it would be relatively easy to find a nearby airport in case I needed to land right away.
As they used to say on TV, be careful out there…
The second leg. Not too bad: (No idea why it won't show the URL for this one... still working on it.)
The third leg, with gusts that I let the autopilot handle:
Surprisingly, the weather on the first leg was forecast to be pretty good, although I waited for some very low IFR to burn off a bit -- a Gulfstream pilot friend doesn’t fly his single engine plane over ceilings less than 1,000 feet in case the engine quits. I went IFR at 6,000 on the first leg, as that let me climb through the clouds without looking for a big enough hole, and it got me into cooler air.
Although it was early, I got a really good burger at Shifters near D73 in north Georgia. When I told the lady I was flying to Iowa, she asked if I was going to drive down to Atlanta and catch a flight. Oh. As the conversation evolved, she said that she had once flown on a thirty seat plane which she described as a “crop duster.” Ahem.
For the next leg, I filed IFR direct at 8,000. My physiology, for whatever reason, wants oxygen much lower than other folks’, but I was ready, and had everything plugged in and tested before takeoff. As the picture shows, the second leg was not direct in any real sense of the word. At 8,000 feet, I was mostly skimming the tops of the cumulus clouds (bases around 3,500 feet), and could usually see the ground somewhere around me.
When I did go through a cloud, tops at nine or ten, it was a ride, but doable. I would usually turn off the autopilot to get additional experience in hand flying. Each bump was a minor upset, and being able to change frequencies while doing that was a minor, a very minor, triumph. The workload was high enough hand-flying the plane that there weren’t very many brain cycles left over for anything else.
On the second leg, there were a few serious storms directly on my route, tops in the mid-forties (really serious storms) so the question was whether to zig around them to the north or to the south. The radar showed a number of measles splotches forming on the southern zig, with great potential for forming an impenetrable line, so I zagged to the north.
On that northern zag, there I went through a few buildups, maybe to ten thou or so, that gave me a >ride<. The workload was high and although the bumps weren’t that bad, the up and downdrafts were beyond my ability to hold altitude within 100 feet.
Then came another cloud, with friskiness that I didn’t see coming, updrafts and downdrafts, bumps being the least of my concerns. It was beyond my ability to keep the plane anywhere near where I wanted it to be, so I turned on the autopilot. To my surprise, the Garmin G3X autopilot did an excellent, incredible, unbelievably good job of holding altitude and, at one point, recovering seemingly immediately from a gust-induced 30 degree bank. (Having given credit were credit is due, there are other things that the autopilot doesn’t do nearly as well as I can do hand-flying, annoyances that I think would be easy to fix. Then again, talk is cheap…)
And when time finally came to descend to the airport, IFR made it easy as I didn’t have to find a big enough hole.
So what’s the takeaway, at least for me:
• IFR in cumulus clouds of any size can be challenging;
• The autopilot is a go/no-go item for me, even though I will not attempt a flight that I think I can’t hand-fly;
• Even the seemingly large deviations added little flight time. And the least fuel reserve I had on any leg was two hours;
• Don’t fly IFR around cumulus clouds if you can’t see what you might be going through. On the third leg, I started the diversion maybe 50 miles away, based on what I could see. And a visual picture is worth so much more than uplinked NEXRAD or center advisories on what their radar sees.
Could I have made this trip VFR? Probably, bouncing along in hot, humid weather under the clouds, avoiding rain shafts and ugly looking clouds. And with GPS, it would be relatively easy to find a nearby airport in case I needed to land right away.
As they used to say on TV, be careful out there…
The second leg. Not too bad: (No idea why it won't show the URL for this one... still working on it.)
The third leg, with gusts that I let the autopilot handle:
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