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