Flight to Kirksville - Part 6
We had flown up knowing that we were taking a significant risk of not getting back on time. Cold fronts roar through the mid-section of the country like speeding trains, so pulling off a VFR flight from Texas to Missouri requires some skill at sandwiching in between them. How well one does is dependent upon how good the forecasts are and how well the pilot can interpret them. For the most part, the forecasts had been fairly accurate. But the Friday weather forecast for Missouri went south Thursday afternoon. I had been expecting good conditions until we approached Houston. Instead, the forecasts began predicting marginal conditions throughout Missouri on Friday morning, with some clearing in the eastern sections as noon approached.
On Friday morning, we headed out to the airport about nine thirty. When we arrived the clouds were slightly above the one thousand foot VFR point but not good enough to take off. I wanted close to twice that for a ceiling and the ceilings were supposed to lift and finally clear out by noon, so I performed my preflight on the airplane, set up the cockpit, and ordered gas while Connie and some of her family waited in the FBO. We watched a corporate jet land and spit out some passengers before taking off again and I amused myself by checking weather every twenty or thirty minutes or so. During one interlude, while I was paying for my gas, I talked with one of the linemen about the absence of tie-down ropes.
“We take them up every winter,” he said. “If we don’t, they just freeze up and, worse, get scattered all over the airport when the snow plows come through. We have to gather them all up before we can cut the grass in the spring, and that’s a real pain.”
Guess that’s what comes of me living south of the Mason-Dixon line most of my life. I had figured the ropes were taken in to avoid freeze/thaw cycles. Snow plows were not in my vocabulary, even though I wanted them to be.
For the next hour or so, I checked weather forecasts and observations at Columbia, Springfield, Kansas City, and Rogers. Even though the clouds did break and clear in Kirksville, the state was clearing from east to west. Instead of flying into improving weather, we would be flying into degrading weather, at least until we approached Rogers where the weather was supposed to clear out. From there, the weather was supposed to be good until we reached Longview when we would approach the weather system that was to trash Houston over the weekend. The later we arrived in Longview, the worse the weather was going to be. Still, it was worth giving it a shot. If we didn’t, we might as well start looking for some way to drive to St Louis and leave the airplane on the Kirksville line for a week or two. Considering the tornados and hail that had just visited the area, that didn’t seem like a good idea. If the weather in flight proved to be too much, we always had the option of landing or turning around. I had planned the flight so that each checkpoint was an airport giving us an “automatic” out if we needed it.
Around eleven thirty a.m., we said “goodbye” to the family and hopped in the Cheetah to leave. The airplane had sat for two days in freezing weather without being started; so I wasn’t sure how easily the engine would turn over, but it started right up. We shut the canopy to keep from freezing to death and ran through our checklists and taxied out. The run-up was nominal so once the takeoff checklist was complete, I taxied us out runway 18.
“Kirksville traffic, November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform departing runway one eight,” I called over the Unicom as I shoved the throttle forward. The Cheetah roared down the runway and lifted into the air. I climbed her to a hundred feet and leveled off, wagging our wings to “wave goodbye” as we roared down the runway. Pulling the nose back, I climbed her up to eighteen hundred feet and leveled her off. I was expecting a two thousand foot ceiling only miles ahead.
We were heading southeast, pressing down toward Kansas City. We had only flown about twenty miles when the scattered puffy clouds just above us thickened up, dimming the sun’s light and closing us up in a grey mist at the edges of our visibility, which was still about ten miles. In front of us we could see only trees and small roads that cut through them. Our first checkpoint was Brookfield, Missouri, an airport with a single four thousand foot concrete runway cutting due north/south. I flipped the radio up to the common traffic frequency of 122.9 and announced our presence some nine miles away and our intent of overflying the airport at about fourteen hundred feet AGL (above ground level). We heard no responses, though we could hear chatter from airplanes at airports miles away.
As we approached, I gauged the ceiling and visibility and decided to press on. While the next flight planned waypoint was the Napoleon VOR just outside Kansas City, I dialed the GPS to show us the course and distance to Lexington Municipal airport almost directly under out path. I set up the VOR to pick up Napoleon, dialing in the bearing that centered up the CDI needle.
The visibility had closed in a little bit. I estimated it at about seven miles, still good enough where I wasn’t uncomfortable. Connie, meanwhile, was scouting lakes below for geese; and she pointed out a rather large flock just lifting off a small lake off our right wing, i.e., dozens of oval white dots beginning to move over the water with air beneath them. They were no threat, but down this low, we were more likely to get picked off by a high-flying tower or low-flying birds than another airplane. Not many people would choose to fly VFR under these low clouds and with this low viz.
The ceilings were holding in at eighteen hundred, so I was down at about twelve to stay my legal distance below them. While I used the panel mounted KLN-89B GPS, my sectional, the VOR to stay on course, Connie tracked our progress on the Airmap 100 handheld GPS. Every now and then I would check with her to see what she was showing. There was generally good agreement, though small splits between the two GPS units were not uncommon.
We were down in a bowl. The world had collapsed into the narrow view we now held, bordered above and on all sides by grey. We were swimming in an ever-expanding microcosm that seemed unreal…the flat plains and small towns sliding past and disappearing into a grey mist that seemed to go on forever. I didn’t see the turf and cracked asphalt runways of Lexington until I was right on top of it; and in the distance, I could see the wide, winding flat snake of the Missouri river and the small, triangular, white tower of the VOR station beyond.
“Help me keep a lookout, here,” I said to Connie. “There’s probably not too many people down here but we might all be converging on the VOR at the same time.”
We flew over the top of the VOR and I cranked us into a turn to the south. We were skirting the eastern edge of Kansas City’s airspace but with the turn moving away. I popped in our next destination into the GPS, i.e., Smith Memorial airport, designator KLRY, and then tuned our second comm. Radio over to the airport’s AWOS or Automatic Weather Observation System. The ceilings were still at around eighteen hundred and visibility was being called ten miles, but that seemed dependent on which I was looking. In front of the airplane I thought it was between five and seven; to my left, I believed it was about ten.
We saw the town of Harrisonville, Missouri, just north of the airport and sitting on top of a “Y” shaped junction of three good-sized highways, one of which ran south just to the left of our nose. I had a hard time finding the airport even though the GPS was pointing at it and the charts showed it right next to the highway. On the radio, I announced our presence and the scooted down the right side of the runway at about thirteen hundred feet. Luckily, there was no one but us around.
We flew right down the highway, following it to the single north-south runway that marked Butler Memorial airport north of the tall, rectangular, grain bins to the west of the town. Visibility ahead seemed to be dropping, so I lowered the nose a little and the view ahead cleared. The ceilings were starting to drop a little. I nosed down to about eleven hundred feet.
A few minutes later, the long, black asphalt runway of the Nevada, Missouri airport slid underneath our left wing. I didn’t see any airplanes down there, but it looked like it was long enough for a jet. Hopefully, that meant it had really nice facilities. While I had looked up the facilities at many of these airports using Airnav.com, I couldn’t remember much about Nevada. But it looked good, so I decided that if I had turn around ahead, we would come back there.
There were only two more airports and about ninety-five miles between us and Rogers. As we approached Lamar some twenty-five miles away, I felt like the ceilings were edging down again and the visibility was dropping a bit as well. There were no automated weather services at Lamar. The closest service was at Joplin, so I dialed up the Joplin ATIS to see if we could pull it in. Joplin was reporting fourteen hundred overcast and five miles viz. As we passed over Lamar, I decided to press ahead, but it was clear that the weather was deteriorating.
Angling off the highway toward Monnet, I said something to Connie about her really helping me spot towers. Most of them were no higher than four or five hundred feet according to the charts, but it is a sad fact of aviation life that not everything that’s on the ground is on the chart. As we burrowed forward, the chart showed me there was a tower three hundred feet tall directly off our nose. I could see it and the flashing white lights outlining its shape, but the visibility had degraded so much that I was unsure how far it was away. Things were looking a little too bad here, like we were flying into solid IFR territory.
“I don’t like what I’m seeing out here,” I said to Connie. “We’re turning around.”
Wheeling the airplane about, I headed us back the way I came. I could try to talk to Flight Service using Flight Watch, but I decided to do my talking about weather back on the ground where things weren’t speeding at me at 120 miles per hour. Lamar was the closest but thinking that Nevada had better facilities, I decided to go there. Dialing Nevada into the GPS, I steered back toward it.
Nevada was a little over 30 miles away. As we bombed along simply making miles back to it to land, the sun began peeking through the overcast in a few spots. That was a very good sign, though the holes were so limited I knew it would be several hours before it all burned off or even broke up enough we could climb on top of it.
The winds were blowing out of the north, so I made an angling straight-in approach for the long, black runway. As we got closer, I could see that the runway that looked so good from a thousand feet didn’t look so good closer up.
To be continued…
On Friday morning, we headed out to the airport about nine thirty. When we arrived the clouds were slightly above the one thousand foot VFR point but not good enough to take off. I wanted close to twice that for a ceiling and the ceilings were supposed to lift and finally clear out by noon, so I performed my preflight on the airplane, set up the cockpit, and ordered gas while Connie and some of her family waited in the FBO. We watched a corporate jet land and spit out some passengers before taking off again and I amused myself by checking weather every twenty or thirty minutes or so. During one interlude, while I was paying for my gas, I talked with one of the linemen about the absence of tie-down ropes.
“We take them up every winter,” he said. “If we don’t, they just freeze up and, worse, get scattered all over the airport when the snow plows come through. We have to gather them all up before we can cut the grass in the spring, and that’s a real pain.”
Guess that’s what comes of me living south of the Mason-Dixon line most of my life. I had figured the ropes were taken in to avoid freeze/thaw cycles. Snow plows were not in my vocabulary, even though I wanted them to be.
For the next hour or so, I checked weather forecasts and observations at Columbia, Springfield, Kansas City, and Rogers. Even though the clouds did break and clear in Kirksville, the state was clearing from east to west. Instead of flying into improving weather, we would be flying into degrading weather, at least until we approached Rogers where the weather was supposed to clear out. From there, the weather was supposed to be good until we reached Longview when we would approach the weather system that was to trash Houston over the weekend. The later we arrived in Longview, the worse the weather was going to be. Still, it was worth giving it a shot. If we didn’t, we might as well start looking for some way to drive to St Louis and leave the airplane on the Kirksville line for a week or two. Considering the tornados and hail that had just visited the area, that didn’t seem like a good idea. If the weather in flight proved to be too much, we always had the option of landing or turning around. I had planned the flight so that each checkpoint was an airport giving us an “automatic” out if we needed it.
Around eleven thirty a.m., we said “goodbye” to the family and hopped in the Cheetah to leave. The airplane had sat for two days in freezing weather without being started; so I wasn’t sure how easily the engine would turn over, but it started right up. We shut the canopy to keep from freezing to death and ran through our checklists and taxied out. The run-up was nominal so once the takeoff checklist was complete, I taxied us out runway 18.
“Kirksville traffic, November Niner Eight Four Eight Uniform departing runway one eight,” I called over the Unicom as I shoved the throttle forward. The Cheetah roared down the runway and lifted into the air. I climbed her to a hundred feet and leveled off, wagging our wings to “wave goodbye” as we roared down the runway. Pulling the nose back, I climbed her up to eighteen hundred feet and leveled her off. I was expecting a two thousand foot ceiling only miles ahead.
We were heading southeast, pressing down toward Kansas City. We had only flown about twenty miles when the scattered puffy clouds just above us thickened up, dimming the sun’s light and closing us up in a grey mist at the edges of our visibility, which was still about ten miles. In front of us we could see only trees and small roads that cut through them. Our first checkpoint was Brookfield, Missouri, an airport with a single four thousand foot concrete runway cutting due north/south. I flipped the radio up to the common traffic frequency of 122.9 and announced our presence some nine miles away and our intent of overflying the airport at about fourteen hundred feet AGL (above ground level). We heard no responses, though we could hear chatter from airplanes at airports miles away.
As we approached, I gauged the ceiling and visibility and decided to press on. While the next flight planned waypoint was the Napoleon VOR just outside Kansas City, I dialed the GPS to show us the course and distance to Lexington Municipal airport almost directly under out path. I set up the VOR to pick up Napoleon, dialing in the bearing that centered up the CDI needle.
The visibility had closed in a little bit. I estimated it at about seven miles, still good enough where I wasn’t uncomfortable. Connie, meanwhile, was scouting lakes below for geese; and she pointed out a rather large flock just lifting off a small lake off our right wing, i.e., dozens of oval white dots beginning to move over the water with air beneath them. They were no threat, but down this low, we were more likely to get picked off by a high-flying tower or low-flying birds than another airplane. Not many people would choose to fly VFR under these low clouds and with this low viz.
The ceilings were holding in at eighteen hundred, so I was down at about twelve to stay my legal distance below them. While I used the panel mounted KLN-89B GPS, my sectional, the VOR to stay on course, Connie tracked our progress on the Airmap 100 handheld GPS. Every now and then I would check with her to see what she was showing. There was generally good agreement, though small splits between the two GPS units were not uncommon.
We were down in a bowl. The world had collapsed into the narrow view we now held, bordered above and on all sides by grey. We were swimming in an ever-expanding microcosm that seemed unreal…the flat plains and small towns sliding past and disappearing into a grey mist that seemed to go on forever. I didn’t see the turf and cracked asphalt runways of Lexington until I was right on top of it; and in the distance, I could see the wide, winding flat snake of the Missouri river and the small, triangular, white tower of the VOR station beyond.
“Help me keep a lookout, here,” I said to Connie. “There’s probably not too many people down here but we might all be converging on the VOR at the same time.”
We flew over the top of the VOR and I cranked us into a turn to the south. We were skirting the eastern edge of Kansas City’s airspace but with the turn moving away. I popped in our next destination into the GPS, i.e., Smith Memorial airport, designator KLRY, and then tuned our second comm. Radio over to the airport’s AWOS or Automatic Weather Observation System. The ceilings were still at around eighteen hundred and visibility was being called ten miles, but that seemed dependent on which I was looking. In front of the airplane I thought it was between five and seven; to my left, I believed it was about ten.
We saw the town of Harrisonville, Missouri, just north of the airport and sitting on top of a “Y” shaped junction of three good-sized highways, one of which ran south just to the left of our nose. I had a hard time finding the airport even though the GPS was pointing at it and the charts showed it right next to the highway. On the radio, I announced our presence and the scooted down the right side of the runway at about thirteen hundred feet. Luckily, there was no one but us around.
We flew right down the highway, following it to the single north-south runway that marked Butler Memorial airport north of the tall, rectangular, grain bins to the west of the town. Visibility ahead seemed to be dropping, so I lowered the nose a little and the view ahead cleared. The ceilings were starting to drop a little. I nosed down to about eleven hundred feet.
A few minutes later, the long, black asphalt runway of the Nevada, Missouri airport slid underneath our left wing. I didn’t see any airplanes down there, but it looked like it was long enough for a jet. Hopefully, that meant it had really nice facilities. While I had looked up the facilities at many of these airports using Airnav.com, I couldn’t remember much about Nevada. But it looked good, so I decided that if I had turn around ahead, we would come back there.
There were only two more airports and about ninety-five miles between us and Rogers. As we approached Lamar some twenty-five miles away, I felt like the ceilings were edging down again and the visibility was dropping a bit as well. There were no automated weather services at Lamar. The closest service was at Joplin, so I dialed up the Joplin ATIS to see if we could pull it in. Joplin was reporting fourteen hundred overcast and five miles viz. As we passed over Lamar, I decided to press ahead, but it was clear that the weather was deteriorating.
Angling off the highway toward Monnet, I said something to Connie about her really helping me spot towers. Most of them were no higher than four or five hundred feet according to the charts, but it is a sad fact of aviation life that not everything that’s on the ground is on the chart. As we burrowed forward, the chart showed me there was a tower three hundred feet tall directly off our nose. I could see it and the flashing white lights outlining its shape, but the visibility had degraded so much that I was unsure how far it was away. Things were looking a little too bad here, like we were flying into solid IFR territory.
“I don’t like what I’m seeing out here,” I said to Connie. “We’re turning around.”
Wheeling the airplane about, I headed us back the way I came. I could try to talk to Flight Service using Flight Watch, but I decided to do my talking about weather back on the ground where things weren’t speeding at me at 120 miles per hour. Lamar was the closest but thinking that Nevada had better facilities, I decided to go there. Dialing Nevada into the GPS, I steered back toward it.
Nevada was a little over 30 miles away. As we bombed along simply making miles back to it to land, the sun began peeking through the overcast in a few spots. That was a very good sign, though the holes were so limited I knew it would be several hours before it all burned off or even broke up enough we could climb on top of it.
The winds were blowing out of the north, so I made an angling straight-in approach for the long, black runway. As we got closer, I could see that the runway that looked so good from a thousand feet didn’t look so good closer up.
To be continued…
posted by Andy Foster at 9:57 PM
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