"cjcampbell" wrote in message
oups.com...

I have flown within a mile of a funnel cloud, lost thousands of feet in
a microburst, flown through embedded thunderstorms, been rolled clear
over at less than 600' AGL by wake turbulence, lost engines to oil
pressure and hail ingestion, had a life raft wrap itself around the
vertical stabilizer, and many other adventures. Hard to say what was
the scariest moment, except that none of them seemed scary until the
next day.


Clear sky funnel cloud scared the living crap out of me and my instructor
when I was getting my helicopter rating. We were at appx 3000 agl near
Jonesboro AR, very flat country. I was about 10 hours into training on a
perfectly clear late September afternoon. My instructor was a young kid from
Germany who comes over a few months each year to build hours instructing.

We see from what at a distance looked like a long plume of smoke coming from
the ground and then dissipating slightly below our altitude. We go to
investigate. As we got closer I started to realize that it was probably not
smoke because the base of it was moving. It dawned on me what it was and I
immediately turned away from it. After we cleared I told the instructor what
it was and he thought I was nuts and he didn't think the base was moving. I
really couldn't argue the issue to strongly because I'd never heard of a
clear sky tornado. So he took the controls we moved back towards it slowly
and climbed to about 4000 ft. When we cot about a mile away we started
feeling some rough air. when we got about .5 to .75 miles we hit sever
turbulence and the bottom dropped out.

When he regained control we were at 1500 ft.