Friday, July 31, 2009

Change of Plans

The plan today was for an early morning flight before work to go land at a few airports in the area I haven't been to before. I was initially planning to head West to the coast, however weather forcasts were showing fog out there, so I decided to head North and make a loop around Seattle, landing at five new airports.

I woke up at 5:30 AM and checked the weather. Already things weren't looking too good as SEATAC was reporting IFR conditions, and Boeing Field was showing solid overcast with a 900'. ceiling. Further North things were clear, so I headed to the airport in hopes that the clouds would start to lift by the time I took off.

The sky was clear at home, but as I drove West on I90 I could see a line of low stratus clouds to the South. At the airport the ceiling looked to be about 1200', so I pre-flighted 9534H with the hope that I could work may way North under the ceiling until I hit clear sky.

I took off on runway 34 and turned East and at 1200' I hit the cloud deck. By the time I was two miles from the airport the ceiling was down to 900' AGL, and looking North and East it appeared to drop even lower. I made the decision to abort the planned flight and turned back to the airport where I made a few touch and go's. This is one reason an IFR rating would come in handy!

So all in all things didn't go quite as planned and I'll have to attempt this flight another day. As I sit in my office writing this, the clouds are breaking up and blue sky is starting to peek through :(

Total time: 0.6 hrs.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sending this! Was very interesting. I have added your blog to my Google
Reader and look forward to seeing what you are up to. MOM!

Pat said...

So you can just land and take off at various airports just to get the practice in of landing and taking off? All before work? Boy, you ARE energetic! LOL! You be careful out there, you hear?