Ones and Zeros

I’ve been silent for several reasons. First, I’ve spent a lot of extra hours working. Being able to work from home isn’t always a benefit! Second, the weather’s been lousy.

Hm. I’m learning to fly IFR so I have to qualify that. The weather’s been, in some ways, great for IFR flying. The freezing level is higher that I want or need to go and the air has been largely smooth. But there are still issues. First are the ceilings.

When the ceiling gets within a couple hundred feet of the minimum, a pilot has to start thinking carefully. First, is the weather trend up or down? How long-lasting and widespread is this weather? If I get out of this airport can I get back if I need to? What are my possible alternates to this airport and how with that affect other non-flight issues? As one instructor tells me, if our alternate is Raleigh NC (190 nm away), he’s still going to want to eat dinner, sleep that night, and get to work (his day job) in the morning.

Then there’s the equipment issue. My plane is IFR capable of course, but somewhat minimal. No autopilot, one VOR, and one GPS (non-WAAS). And one engine. Last there’s the mission. Mine are training flights, we’re not transiting an area of weather, we’d be in it constantly. And frankly, if I don’t get done with my IFR this month, I can finish it next month.

For my training flights, the answers to all the above questions kept coming up negative.

Being safe isn’t making risky decisions and having them work out through luck. Being safe is pre-thinking what might go wrong, making a contingency plan, and setting up guidelines, rules even, for when to exercise those backup plans. The key is to not let a chain of accident events happen. To have a margin of safety.

One of those backups is knowing when to go and when not to go. My instructors and I got into several good discussions about this sort of planning and thinking. Flying VFR can be more clear-cut. So, I was using these discussions to borrow their experience where I had comparatively little.

So not flying was unfortunate. And frustrating. Irritating even. But, definitely educational. Anyhow with all the rain I clearly needed to mow the lawn.