"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth."
Back at my desk at Tara, which is not where I expected to be today. Instead the plan had been--well, the Hurricane Beryl revised plan anyway--to fly back to PC after finishing a series of Zoom depositions in the morning. Then the depositions ran long, and by the time I looked at the weather radar on my phone I was faced with a couple unhappy choices. I could try to pick my way through a measles rash of very strong, hurricane-fueled thunderstorms stretching from Louisiana across the panhandle, and hope the airplane's Nexrad was telling me the truth as I navigated this minefield.
Or I could fly northeast, toward the remains of Beryl herself, and exploit some large gaps in the storm bands to get back to Corning.
Or I could stay in Plano another day, but now Denise had gone home, and with something like seven calls scheduled for Wednesday I'd face more of the same as I tried to depart Dallas on a sultry, stormy late afternoon in the South. I might've ended up spending the week there by the time we were done.
With a birthday coming up on Saturday, and the realization that my plans to get some things done in Florida were likely thwarted by the weather, I elected to fly back to New York.
Besides, the 9th was both the anniversary of our engagement, and my late father-in-law's birthday. I know P really wanted me home. It's nice to have someone want you home, especially her.
So I dropped off the rental car at DFW, took an Uber with a talkative black vegan vaccine sceptic named Rodney, who convinced me at least of the efficacy of his diet and exercise regimen because I wouldn't have pegged him above fifty although he'd just turned 65, and arrived at the Arlington Airport to pay for the annual and fly the Mighty Columbia home.
It was already pushing five in the afternoon.
I hopped in the plane, thinking I was flying to Lexington, Kentucky for a fuel stop, then on to KELM. The first sign of trouble was when I called Arlington ground on the main radio to get my IFR clearance, and after a few calls in the blind realized they could hear me but I couldn't hear them. I tried changing jacks, turning off the squelch, and switching headsets, all to no avail. I'd be flying tonight on my backup radio only.
Then there was the matter of the new number four cylinder, which lightened our load by $5,000.00. A new cylinder must be "broken in", meaning moving power settings in a lower range than normal and keeping the mixture fairly rich, all meant to maintain a cylinder head temperature in a tight range for most of the flight. That, in turn, means more time in the air (because you're going slower) and a higher fuel burn rate. I'll get to the consequences of all that later.
Leaving Dallas was a cluster, as always. The skies are incredibly crowded there, not just by DFW but by the half-dozen or so little airports that surround it, not to mention Love Field. Within not three minutes I was forced to knock off the autopilot and begin an aggressive evasive maneuver to avoid hitting a plane out of Grand Prairie, the pilot of which was talking to no one. From there it was almost a half-hour of intermediate level-offs and meandering across the sprawl until I broke free and headed northeast. In the midst of all that, the new cylinder got past 400 degrees--a big no no on a first flight-and I began to realize the Africa hot temperatures combined with being kept at low altitude by ATC would make this whole cylinder breaking-in a challenge.
Finally I limped northeast, got up to 11,000 feet, and started fiddling with the manifold pressure and fuel flow until the CHT settled into a comfortable but still a little high 380. Then I recalculated my fuels for this new reality, and found I'd arrive at KLEX with seven gallons of fuel total. This would not do, so I changed my flight plan to include a fuel stop at Millington Field, the former NAS Memphis. I landed there once in a T-38. Time flies.
And so did the first bands of Beryl I encountered when I arrived in the traffic pattern there. The Columbia was battered on final with 38 knot crosswinds and more than a mild bump or two. I emerged from the swirling weather a few hundred feet above the ground, and managed a passable landing despite the crosswinds, which by then were down to about 18 knots. A nice young man at the FBO, the only human there besides the guys in the tower, quickly refueled the plane in the rain while I called P, called our FBO in Elmira, and called the airport manager in Elmira to make sure someone could let me through the gate when I landed there after 1 a.m., another consequence of this extra stop.
Soon I was on my way again, banking north along the Mississippi before being cleared direct to KLEX.
The flight to Lexington was only about an hour and forty, but busy because the storm bands of Beryl lay directly in my path. They were easy to see as I leveled off, which was the good news. The bad news was that they were visible because they were so huge, and in fact stood over a hundred miles distant. By the time I reached them, it was pitch dark and I had to rely on Memphis Center and my Nexrad to pick through the gaps. The storm was creating a mess for lots of folks, at that point extending southwest across very busy Nashville International. It was hard to get a word in edgewise on the radio. Plus, they changed my flight plan in flight, so I was bumping around in the dark trying to stay clear of the lightning flashes while reprogramming the flight computer. Not perfect, not perfect at all.
Still, I broke out maybe twenty miles from Lexington, and emerged into a beautiful night with those lightning flashes now behind me. But then my attempt to make up a little time was thwarted when I arrived in the pattern simultaneously with Delta and American Airlines jets with a gate time to make. The big boys have priority. I was vectored all the way to Georgetown before they let me start my approach, which ended with a bumpy landing when I misjudged the width of the runway and flared high. Easy to do in the dark.
The guys at Signature were friendly and seemed happy in their jobs. I've never met a guy whose job involves airplanes who doesn't love his work. They very quickly filled the plane, handed me a cup of coffee one of them had just brewed, along with some peanuts and a sleeve of Oreos that were all free to go along with my $300 tank of gas, and had me back in the air by 11:00. Next stop, KELM and P.
The cockpit filled with a heavy fuel smell on climbout, which was worrisome but dissipated. Then came an hour of boredom during which I pulled out my book and tried to stay awake.
Then came the analog to that moment in a horror movie, when the heroine thinks she's escaped the slasher only to have him emerge from behind the barn with a machete. South of Pittsburgh a new cluster of huge thunderstorms formed, miles ahead of the squall line created by Beryl. This shouldn't happen at midnight, but indeed it did.
I told Cleveland Center I was deviating to the left for weather, which they allowed without complaint given that I was pretty much the last idiot on their radar. Then the controller started showing some concern in his inflexion, which is never a good thing.
"Columbia 223 Sierra Mike, I'm showing you flying directly into a rapidly building cell with moderate to severe precipitation (they never say "thunderstorm" for some reason). Recommend you deviate to a heading of, maybe 355, to get around it."
He was telling me to turn seventy degrees when a typical deviation is perhaps fifteen. This was when the sky lit up in front of me with a brilliant blue flash of lightning, and a cloud that looked like something out of Hindu mythology exposed itself right off the nose.
Still wondering why my Nexrad didn't warn me of this--maybe the four minute data lag?--I turned north and drove for quite some time before I saw clear skies in the direction of Elmira and could keep the flashing monster at bay off my starboard wing. I turned back toward home.
At one a.m. KELM has no tower personnel; in fact, the only person there is some sort of watchman with a nice pickup truck painted in the KELM red livery. This meant I had to turn on the runway lights myself using the radio, but other than that it was all about the same as any other approach here. I landed uneventfully, taxiied to Premier where the watchman waited with the key card for the gate, and P stood on the other side waiting to pick me up. It was 1:30 a.m.
So here I am, with another flying adventure under my belt and a calendar crammed with a stultifying slate of work calls while hugging the window unit because it's as hot here as in PC. So much for escaping north during the hot months. But later P comes home and we'll get to do the catching up we didn't do when our heads hit the pillow at 2 a.m. All good, even if I didn't quite make it back in time for Paul's birthday.
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