Saturday 1 June 2013

Weather.

Yep it’s time for the next instalment of seemingly-innocuous-things-that-scare-the-living-bejeezus-out-of-WMAP.

Previous contenders include “talking on the radio” and “getting lost.”
You may also realise that I seemed to have fended off these demons. By my own admission, my radio work is OK and I managed to recover from being at least temporarily disoriented in the practice area last lesson. So now my psyche has moved on to its next big thing. Weather.

Now being afraid of the weather upsets me just a little. One of the things I love about my adopted land is the weather. We get lots of it. Big weather and my home has a panoramic view of it. I love watching the clouds roll in, the squall lines hit, the snow fall and the wind whip up the water. All of this is beautiful when viewed from a balcony with either a glass of wine or mug of tea in hand, I suspect though, that the view from an aeroplane is not quite so rosy.
So weather scares me, there are some truly horrifying statistics about how long your average PPL can expect to survive if they accidentally wander into IMC. Let’s just say we are talking minutes here.

Bizarrely enough, I’m reasonably confident that if I ever did fly into some unexpected cloud or crud I at least have a plan. My concerns actually stem from a fear of over-reacting.
I’m fairly certain that if I found myself in cloud or reduced visibility that my plan would work. It’s pretty much threefold:

1)      Climb – impacting the sky tends to hurt less than impacting the ground. Ok so I might bust someone’s airspace but again an airspace violation stings less than a crash. Actually busting someone’s airspace might have unintended but good consequences, I’ll probably get someone’s attention on the radar screen.
 
2)      Communicate – talk to someone, anyone. It could be the nearest tower facility; luckily the plethora of controlled airspace around the practice area means I have plenty to choose from and doing #1 should help me get in range. It could be Flight Services (this reminds me – need to add the frequencies to my kneeboard). It could even be another plane on the practice area frequency; they at least might be able to tell me what the weather is doing in the locality.

3)      Ask for help – Unlike some people I have absolutely no problem doing this. I know that ATC will be able to tell me a heading to stick to and get me to somewhere with a runway. Even if I get totally confused and disoriented, they’ll be able to talk me into the approach and I’ll land it from there.

Worst case scenario involves a precautionary landing in a field somewhere and I’ve practiced enough of those to have a fair idea of what I’m doing , Claremont and the local vicinity has many fields to pick from as well.
That paragraph above though is the one that causes me the most anxiety. When does it become so bad that you need to find a field? Although I appreciate that bringing it down in a field is preferable to impacting into the side of a building somewhere, I still can’t help but feel that it would be an interesting phone call to say the least. “Hey Bob, I’m in a field somewhere!”

What if I do that and the cloud was only a transient fixture and flying 2 minutes north would see me in clear air? How the hell do you explain that? Is that why so many pilots press on for “just a few more minutes” and end up a smoking crater?
Non pilots do not realise just how tricky it is to keep straight and level with no visual reference outside. Your senses lie to you. I’ve experienced it personally twice now. Once as a passenger; on the flight back from Las Vegas, it was night I couldn’t see out of the window and I swear we were in a gentle right hand bank the entire flight. Once as a pilot, we were doing recovery from unusual attitudes. My senses swore that we were nose up when in reality I was in a descending turn.

Like with everything experience is the best teacher, maybe I need to be with Bob in some marginal conditions to figure out where my own limits lie.
I just don’t want to be the idiot student who put it in a field because of a solitary cloud.

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