Making the safe decision (AKA "I hate AIRMET ZULU")

On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 11:28:22 +0000 (UTC), (Paul
Tomblin) wrote:

In a previous article, Ron Rosenfeld said:
On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 01:37:41 +0000 (UTC), (Paul
Tomblin) wrote:
I'm just not sure when the conditions are
going to be conducive to bringing the plane home, and the club is NOT
going to be happy about that.

Yes, they would have been much happier had you become an icing accident.

Well, the guy who had it booked for Monday and Tuesday wrote to me that
he'd been thinking of cancelling anyway because of the weather, so I feel
better about that.

This morning I look at the airmets, and there are two of them for icing,
with a narrow little corridor between them straight between BAF and ROC.
Not sure if I trust that narrow corridor to stay open, though. How good
are the boundaries of airmets? Are you ever going to encounter the
conditions outside the boundaries, or are they pretty conservative about
them?

I have not looked in detail at weather in the NY area today. However,
given the general picture these past few days, I would not fly in a
non-deice'd a/c in the clouds higher than the freezing level. There's a
lot of moisture in these clouds.

An FIP map that I downloaded last night valid at 0900Z showed significant
icing probability along your route at 6,000', although it did look doable
at 3,000'.

I flew today from Eastport to Bangor and back in my non-deiced Mooney. But
I stayed at 3,000' and had no ice -- occasional light rain that sure would
have been ice had I been above the FL (about 4,000'). Here, with little
traffic, there were still scattered reports of icing.

One thing that's real important in flying, is to not weigh factors like "so
and so has the plane booked for whenever so I should try harder to get it
back to home base". That's just another form of "get-home-itis".


Ron (EPM) (N5843Q, Mooney M20E) (CP, ASEL, ASES, IA)