Weather experts please help me evaluate this trip on thanksgiving
- Thread starter Bravo
- Start date
That's the problem with weather, especially with these winter systems. You likely won't be able to make even a reasonable call until 18 hours out.
ChrisK
En-Route
I cancelled a flight from 15G to ARB last thursday due to ceilings and snow. I drove cursing the sky the whole way as I looked up at mostly beautiful VFR conditions. I was going to fly with coworkers, so am kinda glad I called it just because of their comfort level flying.
Nope. The correct answer is "What is experience and total time".
EdFred
Taxi to Parking
Jimmy cooper
En-Route
A recent example of experience and total time would be the doctor, a recent holder of an IFR ticket, low time who elected to take off in lousy conditions and immed. Lost control and killed himself. A more experienced pilot, say who flew instruments often, Or for a living would have probably survived. It's usually the " occasional " instrument pilot who gets his ashes hauled, but sometimes it's the student and the CFI who get killed together for lack of experience.
Dead Stick
Line Up and Wait
Nope. The correct answer is "What is experience level and equipment?"
Plenty of highly experienced ATPs have removed themselves from the gene pool attempting flights that were well within their experience/competency level and would have been absolutely and totally routine in their Boeing "daily driver" but a bit much for their Bonanza, Baron, etc. just as plenty of inexperienced guys flying around in their new TAAs have found themselves overwhelmed by conditions quicker than they could ever imagine.
For those of us who have been flying transport category jets for decades, if we're not careful, we tend to take for granted all of those neat switches that our work airplanes have that make most weather concerns go away. It takes some different skillsets and arguably more judgement to fly light GA aircraft and those skills get rusty if they haven't been used in decades - in spite of that fact that you've been flying 100's of hours per year in the meantime.
Like I said, it doesn't do one bit of good to worry about the weather. There is nothing that you can do about it one way or the other. It doesn't matter what your experience level is or the capabilities of your equipment, when you wake up the morning of the trip it will either be good enough for you to go or it won't. It's just that when I'm flying my working airplane, there's not a lot that will cause us to cancel. Not so when I'm flying "little" airplanes.
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Dead Stick
Line Up and Wait
Never confuse total time with experience, it's like confusing currency with proficiency. One has little to do with the other. There is a difference between 1000 hours of experience and one hour of experience repeated 1000 times.Nope, the correct QUESTION is "What is experience and total time?"
Bravo
Pre-takeoff checklist
It looks like this trip wasn't supposed to happen. The forecasts just kept getting worse and now we are sitting in a winter storm warning and looks like cold and ifr tomorrow am at this point at my departure airport. Thanks to those of you willing to help. I have canceled my plans and the insight I was looking to get was based on a different weather situation than has panned out. I wouldn't think of flying in this weather so there really isn't anything to learn here after all.
I do have a question. I know I have been trained to stay out of the clouds in +2c to -20c. What is your take on this when below the clouds with precip falling from above?
I do have a question. I know I have been trained to stay out of the clouds in +2c to -20c. What is your take on this when below the clouds with precip falling from above?
EdFred
Taxi to Parking
I didn't even bother with what was being said. I was pointing out that Jeopardy has questions for answers.
Sort of like someone saying 2+2 are 5, vs 2+2 is 5. Both are false statements, but the latter is the correct way to state it.
azure
Final Approach
It depends on a lot of things, but mainly the ambient temperature and the phase of the precip. Generally, snow won't stick when you're moving at 100+kts, but if it does and your airframe is above freezing, and then you move into a colder regime, you could get iced up, theoretically. And if the precip is liquid, and the temp is below freezing, well, you know where that leads to.
Generally though, I don't worry about snow as long as I'm below the clouds. I would not assume that those clouds don't contain liquid water, though.
poadeleted20
Deleted
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- Apr 8, 2005
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Good plan until you learn a lot more about icing, say, from Scott Dennstaedt's "Ice Is Not Nice" course.
https://avwxworkshops.com/index_guest.php
What kind of precip? Liquid? Frozen? Freezing? What is the temp where you are? How much airspace below you, and what is the temperature profile from where you are down to the surface? Again, Scott's course will teach you a lot more about how to evaluate such a situation.