A Weather Check

I started the week with a full flight schedule. One flight would be a student's solo cross-country flight, the others were early familiarization flights leading up to landing pattern work. The first was cancelled for early morning thunderstorms. An unusual pattern for west central Florida, a high-pressure system in the Gulf was pushing warm moist air east forming cumulous clouds as the air mass crossed the beach. As the sun warmed the humid air the early morning clouds grew into thunder monsters that no pilot would want to play with.

The solo flight was cancelled. I decided to check to see if I could get the other students in before the monsters came ashore. The preflight went well, although it took a bit longer to "burp" Sally since she had been sitting in her hangar for a week. Oil was just shy of the full mark. The sumps were clean. Coolant was good.  I could see the bottoms of both tanks so I added 5 gallons of Mogas from Wawa to the pilot's side. She rolled easily out of the hangar.

Winds were light out of the south. The airport preferred runway was 23, but that was a long hot taxi from the south hangar. I decided to use runway 18 which was a short taxi to the run-up area. I actually had to wait for the oil temp to rise to 122F. Sally was running fine, all systems normal. It was 9:30am when we took off. The clouds to the west were already building.

We headed east to get out away from the airport environment.  The air was stable, no turbulence at 1500ft. Visibility was better than 10 miles with no clouds over the middle of the state. We turned north keeping the line of puffy white clouds to our left. I practiced some steep turns (turns out I needed the practice) as I watched the weather. The clouds were turning gray.

We headed back to the airport for landing practice. It was about 10:30am and I did two turns on RWY23 (each was very good) before changing over to RWY18 for my final landing of the day. The clouds were now dark and I could see showers nearby. I put Sally in the hangar. Kathy sent me a text reporting heavy showers at home.

This was definitely NOT student pilot weather. Maybe next week would be better.

Video Notes: Alone

Heavy Rain

We sat in the restaurant at Sebring. I had a really good BLT and he had the special of the day, a hamburger. As we finished we both started paying more attention to the weather. The puffy clouds were getting darker. He called for the weather brief and put it on the speaker. Typical afternoon Florida weather, "VFR was not advised."

We had lots of options. Most of the heavy stuff was north of KVDF moving south. Plant City and Lakeland were not options.  A few broken lines of cells were building to the south-west but I was sure we could get around them and if we needed to could get back into Venice.  Along the shoreline of Tampa Bay it was still clear and out along the gulf coast it was good. So Clearwater, Albert Whitted, and Peter O. Kight were all in play. (Sarasota was my "Ace in the Hole".)

The chart said it would take less than an hour of flight time to cover the 63 miles from SEF to VDF. Slight headwinds meant it might take a bit longer. We leveled off at 2000' and pushed the autopilot button to let Sally do the work while we discussed options. There was a dark wall of storms to the north clearly visible outside which matched the depiction on the Nexrad weather display. We would not go there. To the west, we could see thin isolated showers and the horizon through them. The south looked good and back to the east was still clear. We proceded on a west-north-westerly heading. It got darker.

There was a gap in the clouds slightly south of our track and we decided to take it. Clear blue skies were visible over the bay extending all the way to the gulf. But the track took us right over my "Nightmare Towers." He asked me for their height and I immediately responded "1650". We were at 2000' and saw the lights flashing on the towers as we passed north of them, Sally yelling "Obstacle" the whole time. It was still dark.

We started to turn the corner after passing I75. Rain to the right, sun to the left, we headed north to see if VDF was possible. AWOS told us that winds were from the south at 9G14 so I planned to go north of the field to set up for a long straight-in to RWY23. But once we had the field in sight we knew that plan wouldn't work. The storm was moving south and engulfed the northern edges of the airport. But RWY18 was still good. I announced an extended right base and made a no-flap landing as the rain started. It was a good landing.

We taxied to the hangar and waited for a moment before opening the canopy. When it let up we popped the canopy went into the hangar and waited for a while to allow the storm to pass. It was a good lesson.

BTW, wing lockers are not waterproof.