It was mid-July 2023 and I was very excited to fly my first cross-country navigation flight that would have more than one stop. I had recently gained an RPL and was looking forward to this new challenge.
The weather had been beautiful leading up to the day – calm, clear blue skies and no rain. I doublechecked the weather forecast in NAIPS and the BOM website, and the worst was a slight chance of rain at my first destination, Dubbo.
The TAF for Dubbo was SCT 4,000 OVC 9,000, with a TEMPO of visibility 5,000 metres and light rain showers from 3 pm. Still VMC – OK. The TAF for Mudgee was SCT 5,000 OVC 8,000, with light winds at both destinations. I also checked the GAF and it showed only the high broken cloud and middle scattered cloud that was forecast in the TAFs.
To add to my eagerness to complete the flight, I had arranged to meet an old friend at the Royal Flying Doctor Service visitor centre in Dubbo, which I was looking forward to visiting for the first time.
‘No problem,’ I thought, doing a quick time calculation in my head. ‘I’ll arrive at Dubbo around 12:30 pm and depart well before those showers arrive at 3 pm.’
So I headed off. Shortly after departing Cessnock, I received a phone call from my friend in Dubbo, concerned the weather was worse than forecast – there were already scattered light showers.
I usually have good intuition and my gut feeling was telling me to turn around and land. ‘But I had just departed!’ my rational brain said. I took the macho attitude – I didn’t want to let my friend down. So I replied, ‘No problem, I’m on my way, I’ll be there soon.’
The first leg to Denman was okay but, tracking to Dubbo, the cloud base was lower and thicker than forecast. I could see showers right over the top of the airport and it wasn’t even 1 pm yet! ‘The forecast lied to me,’ I thought, annoyed.
I landed and parked in the light rain and went to meet my friend at the visitor centre. We whizzed through, as I was keen to head off before the weather became worse.
My friend even offered for me to stay over, but I was concerned the flight school needed the aircraft for bookings early the next morning and staying over would cause a fiasco,
so I headed off.
Out to the west, the cloud base was high but the direction where I would be heading was all clouds, right down to the hills in the distance. After departing Dubbo, I could see there were clouds and rain showers everywhere ahead. It looked like there was nowhere to go except through it. My mind was racing.
They say situational awareness is not only an understanding of the current state of the aircraft and the surrounding environment, but also a projection of its future state. Well, in this case I could see it was going to get worse. I could see a heavy rain cloud right in front, on my track.
There was no going over it, there was no going under it (because of the high terrain) and I didn’t want to deviate around it in case I got lost! It was a situation of lowering cloud base and rising terrain – and I knew it. Yet I felt powerless to the feeling that, somehow, I just had to press on, that the aircraft was somehow determined to fly on. I was flying on ‘autopilot’ and, in a sense, behind the aircraft.
As the visibility reduced and I could no longer see a visible horizon, I began to scan the instruments. To my alarm, the VSI was reading a 1,000-fpm descent! I had inadvertently pushed forward slightly to try to get under the cloud. I was now heading quickly towards 4,000 feet and knew the terrain was well over 3,000!
I fought the urge to keep pushing down and levelled off. The heavy rain battered the windscreen with an almighty crackle. I had the carb and pitot heat on and all the aircraft lights. Thankfully, I passed through the rain shower after about 30 seconds – by far the most tense 30 seconds of my flying thus far.
I was glad to see the end of it – with roads and houses becoming visible, Mudgee was now in sight! I made inbound and circuit calls and landed on a wet rainy runway. There was no-one in sight, so I quickly took off and made a departure call.
Thankfully the cloud base was higher to the west as I flew to Denman before returning down the Hunter Valley to Cessnock. The weather kept improving and I thought how lucky I was and enjoyed the orange rays of sun through the clouds as I made my inbound call to Cessnock. To my surprise, the runway was covered in huge puddles! And where was everyone?
Later I was told there had been a massive storm here just half an hour ago with hail and lightning! We put all the aircraft away and everyone has gone home.’
Wow. So it was pure luck that I stopped in at the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Otherwise, I would have been returning home to a huge thunderstorm, in the middle of winter.
Lessons learnt
This was a classic case of get-home-itis and inexperience. Forecasts may be updated with
weather improvement or deterioration at any time.
Electronic flight bags and GPS apps, with live weather data and storms displayed on a moving map, are commonly used by VFR pilots. EFBs were not used during training to reinforce basic navigation skills; like other student pilots, we learnt to fly with paper charts, however, that did not prevent us from using our devices to recheck the weather at a destination.
As this was my first solo flight with more than one stop, I was not accustomed to having that time on the ground and, in hindsight, it would have been easy to recheck the weather on my phone.
You are the pilot in command. Do not press on in marginal weather. It is not worth flying into the ground in an effort to get to your destination – you may never reach it. Also, the information from my friend on the ground in Dubbo was gold and I really should have paid more attention to it.
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