Operation Butt Freeze

denverpilot

denverpilot

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Nov 8, 2009
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DenverPilot
Haha...

My boss drops the news that we all had to burn our remaining vacation time before end-of-year a few days ago, so... What the heck.

It is time to go to Nebraska and be beat up by Jesse! :)

What? It's like 10F? ;)

Huh? It gets dark at like 4:30? ;)

And logistics... Room, car... Yadda Yadda.

Probably won't be able to get a DPE?

Sure! Why not?! :) It's all good!

So I'm off to the great frozen plains to let Jesse turn my brain to oatmeal with Instrument training for a week. Departing tomorrow.

No pressure to finish up in this trip, some crazy dude from Denver is just showing up and we get done what we get done. ;)

Only squawk on the airplane is the parking brake failed, ironically... Since we just had a thread on that.

Gotta pack up a lot of crap tonight including my work desk... Haha... No not bad news. We were supposed to do a desk shuffle on Friday afternoon.

Now I'm just moving stuff to an empty desk and I'll finish setting up at the new desk late next week...

Next stop, Lincoln NE! :) :) :)
 
cool. fly down here this weekend and we'll have lunch at Stearman
 
Have fun! I'm sure you'll enjoy the pounding of an accelerated instrument rating.
 
I don't think you'll regret it. I've seen Jesse's work, unbenounced to him, to decide that the best way outta here (Peoria) one late wintry afternoon, was VFR, and it was a low overcast. He has good judgement and is a good listener.

Good Listening and observing is the hallmark of a good CFI. Let the torture commence!

"It's a beautiful day out and you're insisting that I put this paper bag over my head?"

Oh, yeah. And it's cold.
 
Have fun, but I'd still be plenty irritated if someone told me when I had to take my own vacation time. Especially if that bomb was dropped at year end.
 
woodstock said:
Have fun, but I'd still be plenty irritated if someone told me when I had to take my own vacation time. Especially if that bomb was dropped at year end.
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Not to get too far off track...it's quite common in some industries. For example, our production facilities close 2x/year for maintenance and those employees can either take paid vacation or unpaid time off.
Back to Operation Butt Freeze :D
 
Arbiter419 said:
Awesome! From what I've seen so far, Jesse gets stuff done. I'm sure you won't regret it.
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+1.

One of these days I'll have to have him teach me how to fly.
 
pilot_dude said:
Not to get too far off track...it's quite common in some industries. For example, our production facilities close 2x/year for maintenance and those employees can either take paid vacation or unpaid time off.
Back to Operation Butt Freeze :D
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I'd take it unpaid...
 
woodstock said:
I'd take it unpaid...
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If you have vaca available it must be used. Can only go unpaid if you burned your earned vaca. Sucks IMHO but I don't work in our production facilities for a reason. :)
 
Lucky you. This is my slow time at work and I have the vacation time to take but the plane is not ready. Maybe I can bother him when I get rid of the old inop ADF and Loran and add a VOR and DME
 
Have some gloves for in the plane ... My planes both cook your legs and freeze your hands. Paper towels stuffed in the wing root area where it's drafty helps even though it looks crummy.

Anyway, I'm sure you'll have a great ol' time. Hopefully you won't learn too much about ice other than slipping on it on the sidewalks, but you're from Colorado so you know about cold.

It's finally warmed up today and melted all our snow :)
 
knowing Jesse you're plane will probably break down...
 
mucho congrats!

I'm jealous. I've been chipping away pretty good at the IR lately, but its been slower than I would like. I would love the opportunity to go at it for a week straight.

best of luck, hope you have great weather (for instrument training that is)
 
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Last time I looked, most 182's have heaters.

One of these years, I gotta install one in my ride...
 
I can't wait to meet you, Nate. We'll have to grab some lunch some day while you're here. I may have to ride along on one of your lessons as well...so that I can snicker at the frozen sweat building up on the back of your neck.
 
If this doesn't work out like you hope, maybe you can find somebody else to fly with you in Palm Springs in August.
 
Maybe Jesse can arrange for a highly-trained ATP / airline pilot to sit in the back seat and snicker at you when you screw up. It's a great instructional technique (as in, if I don't screw up, I won't get the flak from the Peanut Gallery).

---

You'll have fun with Jess - the force is strong with this one.
 
Nor should you overlook the unique opportunities for learning little-known facts regarding aviation weather that will arise while training in Lincoln later this month. For example, do you know that the both C and F-measured temps are identical at -40? Do you know all the ways that plugs can be frosted? NE in December is a veritable storehouse of knowedge that should be fully embraced.
 
Keep an eye on him. He can be a very sneaky gypsy, and likes to fail instruments at very unfortunate times.

(You will have alot of fun, and learn a ton. Jesse is a great instructor and I am proud to call him a friend.)
 
Right now, the departure to LNK tomorrow morning might get delayed...

4b94241c-5177-8025.jpg


We'll see if this changes significantly in the morning.

Heh. So it begins...
 
"Heh," indeed.
 
KLNK 081254Z 00000KT 9SM FEW110 M09/M11 A3020 RMK AO2 SLP249 T10941106 $

Looks like things might drop down again later this afternoon but as soon as that clears out things are looking pretty clear-ish.
 
Good luck, Nate. And good choice.

pilot_dude said:
Not to get too far off track...it's quite common in some industries. For example, our production facilities close 2x/year for maintenance and those employees can either take paid vacation or unpaid time off.
Back to Operation Butt Freeze :D
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Our company essentially shuts down between Christmas & New Year. It's considered "holiday" time, and it comes at the expense of several paid holiday days throughout the year.
 
Good luck and have fun!

My clients typically all go pretty quiet during that period as well. Unfortunately, "quiet time" for them usually means "patch and upgrade" time for me.
 
Just sharing.

The only place in the central U.S. where the weather turned to crud, is my path to LNK. LOL!

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Note location of airplane. Ha.

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So far I've been in watch-and-wait mode, but the limiting factor starts to become daylight at the other end here eventually.

Dewpoints too close together. Visibility varying over different reporting points.

Was just texting Jesse and saying that nothing from GRI east gives me any warm fuzzies. :(

Look how puuurty it is at this end of the route...

4b94241c-f88e-eabe.jpg


Ebony the old dog says hi by the way, and my neighbor's shed needs some work. ;)
 
And for those "playing along" with the home version of this game...

I called it off for today. Reset room/car reservations for tomorrow and will start looking at forecasts for that.

I could have played the "hop from one airport to the next" game avoiding clouds/precip with the Mark 1 eyeball, and perhaps the "Ahh, sleeping on an FBO couch" thing, since I'm in no rush...

But I'd only mess with that if LNK's forecast were any better for a couple hour window before sunset.

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If that was a well-defined area of ice/crud one could go around it too, but neither north nor south offers much in the way of "outs" right now unless you get quite a ways south into Kansas.

Just sharing my thoughts for commentary. Was using the weather maps in a new way today too... Was thinking, "So self... If you had the IFR ticket could you make this flight?"

Thats a very interesting question. My initial analysis would be "wouldn't be smart".

Jesse pointed out that the Skew-T over GRI shows that *maybe* the ice stops at 11000 or so, which caused me to pause and think. All these years of VFR weather decisions has my brain trained to look at staying below the crud. Not above it. (I'm not a big fan of flying VFR over the top of stuff unless there's some pretty easy and visible "outs"!)

So maybe in a Skylane you could go over most of this. Maybe. So I looked at Pireps. They don't seem to back that up today, though.

So just playing with the weather in my head, assuming you went over and got to LNK... Now what. Do you become an ice ball descending for the approach?

It's turned out to be an interesting thought game for me. And at my current skill and experience level with weather like this, I think I'll gladly sit here under partly sunny skies and continue to play the home game version of this one today. ;)

I'm wondering how many people are chuckling right now knowing this line o' crud between "here" and "there" happened to be two years in a row going to OSH too? ;) Those were thunderstorms though, and I know how those tend to behave and how to avoid them, far better than I understand ice.

We'll see what tomorrow's forecast brings...

I always also enjoy comparing the TAFs to exactly what happened so I'll be watching the METARs along the route the rest of the afternoon.
 
Nate, always enjoy a good go/no go thread. good practice for all of us.
 
The satellite overlay is fun too. One big frozen blob from Eastern Colorado to KLNK...

Note the colored dots for those who aren't Foreflight users. Green is VFR, Blue is Marginal VFR, Red is IFR, Pink is low IFR.

aefdb1db-1aa1-239e.jpg


The big frozen blob is slowly moving East.

And the "out" I'd considered if I were wandering out that way, actually did hold... but the forecasts earlier were a tad pessimistic... Northern Kansas is still VFR with about 4000' OVC all along that line.

Problem is, in spots it's down to 1500' and there's a lot of tall radio towers out that-a-way, so you'd have to keep deviating right (south).

With LNK's forecast not showing a "window" that's definite later today, you'd be forced to land somewhere along the edge of the gook and then be prepped to get moving north if an hour window or so opened up.

Too many negatives for me as I watch it unfold from sunny Denver. ;)

Our freezing drizzle forecast hasn't materialized at all. That one was a total "miss" by NOAA/NWS here so far. I can also clearly see a pretty good inversion layer over Denver right now (our "brown cloud"), so our "warm, protected bubble" effect is in full force as usual.

Mountains to the West have their usual layer of clouds parked on top of them that is dissipating as soon as the moist air "falls" over into the Denver bowl. Looks like the valleys up there are probably full of clouds.

You can see the cool V-shaped split over Denver extending put towards AKO in the overcast on the satellite view.
 
A friend here locally added a little levity to my no-go decision.

"Ice cubes. Good for cocktails, bad in cockpits." ;)
 
woodstock said:
Have fun, but I'd still be plenty irritated if someone told me when I had to take my own vacation time. Especially if that bomb was dropped at year end.
Click to expand...

It's all use-or-lose where I work. Have to use it all each year. No banking vacation for next year.

SCCutler said:
Maybe Jesse can arrange for a highly-trained ATP / airline pilot to sit in the back seat and snicker at you when you screw up. It's a great instructional technique (as in, if I don't screw up, I won't get the flak from the Peanut Gallery).

---

You'll have fun with Jess - the force is strong with this one.
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Reminds me of an approach to PUW a number of years ago. Squirrely croswinds, wife in right seat and two ATPs for Horizon Airlines holding short and grading the landing. No pressure at all. :D

denverpilot said:
A friend here locally added a little levity to my no-go decision.

"Ice cubes. Good for cocktails, bad in cockpits." ;)
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Absolutely correct.
 
denverpilot said:
Note the colored dots for those who aren't Foreflight users. Green is VFR, Blue is Marginal VFR, Red is IFR, Pink is low IFR.
Click to expand...

It's beyond me why all the different weather sources aren't required to standardize their colors. This is a huge safety issue IMO.

Good luck with both the trip & training, Nate.
 
Late to the thread, but I was in Florida...

I can recommend the place we were at, Cocoa Beach. Nice beaches, nice hotels with lower rates (this is their off season). Good food. Especially Coconuts... well executed burger and very generous on the alcohol when asking for mixed drinks.

Kennedy space center is near by. Airboat rides are fun. And there is a Warbird flying experience available.

Lots of good GA airports in the region.


And did I mention it was warm? Like 70's?
 
Good choice calling off the flight today. Just goes to show that the IFR ticket isn't a fix-all. It just makes the go/no-go decisions that much more difficult.
 
jason said:
Good choice calling off the flight today. Just goes to show that the IFR ticket isn't a fix-all. It just makes the go/no-go decisions that much more difficult.
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Tony was the first person to tell me that, and I agree 100%. Multi-engine, FIKI, etc. all do the same for making go/no-go more difficult.
 
Looks like a beautiful morning underway right now as I peer out the window to the west. Not so beautiful drive in much earlier this morning with fog and freezing fog ... dark is so much darker in the fog! :)
 

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Yeah quick iPhone post. Flight into LNK was great. Meeting up w/Jesse shortly.

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