Cold Wx Flying

dmccormack said:
I just wish the whole weather apparatus would drop the "Wind chill" deal -- they drone on about it as if it's some scientific measure....

:mad2:
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I think it's a scientific measurement of suckiness, to be applied in situations such as your pre-flight. For example, -2 degrees, no wind? Kind of sucks. -25 wind chill? Really, really sucks. :eek:
 
dmccormack said:
I just wish the whole weather apparatus would drop the "Wind chill" deal -- they drone on about it as if it's some scientific measure....
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Is this one of those things that a non-scientific instrument (my face) can detect when a scientific one cannot?

When it is breezy, it sho nuff feels much much colder!
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
Is this one of those things that a non-scientific instrument (my face) can detect when a scientific one cannot?

When it is breezy, it sho nuff feels much much colder!
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Exactly right -- before "Wind Chill" we used to say "It's really cold out!"

Now the Weather Channel weenies have something else to whine about... :frown2:
 
steingar said:
I've yet to encounter gloves sufficient for winter riding. The best I was ever able to manage was latex under wool under my heaviest winter gloves. Even that stopped working below freezing, although I could still work the controls--barely.

I think the only thing likely to work is the heated gear they sell. I've just never ridden the kind of bikes you can plug that stuff into.
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I can run below 30 on my Bandit with my heated grips and two pairs of gloves. The outside of my hand (knuckles) will get cold with time but it remains bearable.

The inside of my hands get hot enough that you have to take your hand off teh grip to let some cold air hit it else it'll burn you.

I do think the heated gloves, heated vest, heated pants, heated socks, etc would be cool but that stuff is freaking expensive.

The worst part it seems for me is my neck / face. No matter what I try when it gets that cold I just can't any full-face helmet to seal up and retain heat. Maybe I need a heated helmet....
 
jesse said:
The worst part it seems for me is my neck / face. No matter what I try when it gets that cold I just can't any full-face helmet to seal up and retain heat. Maybe I need a heated helmet....
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With a regular helmet, ski goggles and a long scarf wrapped up over the nose worked well for me.
 
Geico266 said:
It was -7F today in Lincoln, and I went flying for an hour. My desity altitude calculator said -850'!
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A couple of weeks ago we had -35C, and the machine shows a DA of 2320' below sea level. And our airport is at 2975'! So there was a difference of around 5300'. It really shows up in the true airspeed: watching the 172s on final, they seem hardly to be moving. That's at our -25C limit; at -35C they'd be even slower. The air is so dense at those temps that you can cut out a chunk with a knife and suck on it:D

Dan
 
Geico266 said:
It was -7F today in Lincoln, and I went flying for an hour. My desity altitude calculator said -850'!
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When I looked at ForeFlight this morning, KCID had a temp of M25 and an altimeter of 30.60 - It calculated that as -4,667.

I'd have flown, if I'd have been in MSN. Club here isn't in heated hangars and doesn't have cowl plugs. :(
 
Just returned from Callaway Minnesota (Maplelag cross country ski resort, a great place to spend New Years!)

-33.9F at 5:30am this morning. It was the .9 that made it for me.

Teresa's truck started and we wound up jump starting two other friends and you had to take great care with all that cold soaked metal if you were barehanded for any of it.

They had a hole in the ice for the polar bear jump (a fluxuation in insurance has made it intermittent from year to year) and this is the first year I have not done it when it was open. No way.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
Woosies! The Big Dog of cold weather is here, and will now tell you about cold.

Minus 40 (F and C meet at M40)
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I was in Montreal and it could have been in 1993. -40* downtown, and there was wind too. The most I could stand walking down the sidewalk was one block, then I had to duck into a store to warm up. I was wearing corduroy pants and the wind cut through the cords like a series of vertical knives...

The next day we flew commercial back to BDL. It was so cold they could not get one turboprop started in the Saab 340. They ran an elephant's trunk up the tailpipe to preheat the engine, and 30 min later we were on our way.

-Skip
 
flyingcheesehead said:
When I looked at ForeFlight this morning, KCID had a temp of M25 and an altimeter of 30.60 - It calculated that as -4,667.

I'd have flown, if I'd have been in MSN. Club here isn't in heated hangars and doesn't have cowl plugs. :(
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I flew past CID last evening on the way home from Florida and much of the way across IA and MN it was 10-15F warmer at 6000 MSL than it was on the ground once the sun set. Even so my DA was a little over 3000 ft.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
Cripes, you'd have to do a partial power takeoff so you didn't overboost!
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That happens. One of our guys who worked in the North said he was forever replacing IO-520 cylinders on the 185s because the pilots wouldn't go easy on the throttle when spooling up for takeoff in the extreme cold.
And no amount of trying to explain it made any difference.

Dan
 
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