Living up to my reputation

As the harbinger of crappy weather. We managed to find the only bit of descending cloud in the entire sky during pretty much the whole day!

Despite my meticulously planned route, RTH and I had to cut our little navigation exercise short at my first checkpoint because we were in danger of flying into the aforementioned crud. The conditions were probably marginal and it was hard to predict just what the clouds were going to do. Neither myself nor RTH has any real desire to fly into snow bearing clouds. We turned around and came back.

That’s not to say that the flight was wasted. Not by any means. I learned a whole lot from the right hand seat. I got an insight into RTH’s decision making processes. By incessantly quizzing him about what he was thinking and what he was basing his decisions on, it all added to my experience base. I learned that you can ask pilots up ahead of you what the weather is doing and what cloud conditions are like, on the area common frequency. I’d never thought of doing that! I also learned that there are many people who blunder through that area without making a single position call.

I also learned that today, the weather network, flight services, the METAR and TAF were all completely and utterly useless when it came to predicting the cloud layers! But I think I may have known that already!