Risky weather

This concept has become so encapsulated in the aviation community that the FAA has even released the Risk Management Handbook, which lists all the ways to identify risk and make decisions to protect ourselves in flight. But before we can journey down our road of risk mitigation, we first must understand what risk is, other than a board game that you probably played when you were younger.

The Risk Management Handbook defines risk as “the future impact of a hazard that is not controlled or eliminated.” With this definition, we start entering the quagmire of safety information laid out by the FAA. To truly understand risk—a subject so deeply ingrained into our aviation culture—we must first identify hazards associated with our flight activities. This process sounds easy enough. But it can be a real challenge.

Hazards come in many sizes and flavors, which makes them difficult to pin down. Thirty-seven missing rivets on the left wing are easy to identify as “risky,” but it’s when things start becoming murkier that real problems begin to occur.

I was introduced to all the risk mitigation and assessment tools when I began my instrument training in January. I had memorized every checklist (PAVE, IMSAFE, NWKRAFT, and more) that it takes to become a safe and proficient pilot. I had sat through multiple mind-numbingly boring ground sessions on systems and weather theory, and thought that I genuinely had a grasp on what it takes to become a safe instrument pilot. So, on that dreadfully cold day in February, I planned an instrument cross-country flight to Waco, Texas (ACT), from my home airport of Georgetown, Texas (GTU), at 6,000 feet that included a practice ILS approach into Waco and a practice RNAV approach back into Georgetown.

The weather became our most significant concern on this short flight; the overcast ceilings were low, but not low enough to warrant a no-go decision. Cloud tops were also within our minimums; the layer was relatively thin (about 500 feet) over Georgetown, and all information pointed towards a similar situation around Waco. The temperature is where things started getting interesting. Surface temperatures were miserably cold for Texas, roughly 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10 degrees Celsius). The alarm bells in our heads were beginning to ring. Our aircraft, the proud Piper Archer, was not certified for known icing conditions and had little to no deice or anti-ice equipment onboard.

We should not have been in the air that day, no matter what the reports said or who else was sharing the sky with us.Now contending with the possibility of icing in an airplane made only for nice warm days, we started consulting our sources to determine the probability of icing on our flight. We meticulously studied the ForeFlight briefings and imagery, all of which supported the notion that we would most likely be fine. Unconvinced, we contacted a weather briefer. Pireps and winds aloft also supported a decision to continue with the flight. Still slightly skeptical, we filed our flight plan and continued our flight.

Around the same time, another flight instructor flying in from the same direction that we were about to fly into sent us a picture of the outside air temperature on the Garmin G1000 that read 43 degrees F (6 degrees C) at 5,000 feet. With this information, we started to relax a bit. There is a belief that temperatures only get colder when you increase altitude and warmer when you decrease. If this belief were to hold up, it would become increasingly warmer when we started our descent to our selected airport. This belief proved to be false.

We started the aircraft, received our clearance, and taxied out to the runway. Everything was going perfectly. Our first sign of trouble was on the climbout; we entered the overcast layer and found it thicker than our weather reports had anticipated. We broke out of the cloud layer and climbed to 6,000 feet. At cruise altitude, the OAT read considerably lower than the other instructor’s information and what the weather briefings said. We were not into a freezing level, but we were getting dangerously close. Contending with this new, first-hand knowledge that the weather was far worse than anticipated, we decided to press on to Waco and attempt to shoot the approach.

We continued the flight above the clouds and noticed that the cloud tops were getting higher. We started receiving vectors and, anticipating possible icing, requested all descents at our discretion. Then, the time finally came to descend into the clouds and shoot the approach. We began our descent and monitored the OAT. Now, common sense and weather theory would anticipate an increase in temperature with a descent, but that’s not what happened in this case. As we descended through the ever-thickening cloud layer, the OAT started to plummet. My instructor peered out onto the wing, and to our horror, we had started picking up a layer of rime ice on the leading edge. We halted our descent and began a rapid climb back up to our cruising altitude where we knew what the temperature was going to be, and notified ATC of our new intentions to go back home.

Now that we were back above the clouds in temporary safety, we would eventually have to go back down. We dialed up the ATIS frequency and got the weather. Ceilings at Georgetown were getting lower, cloud layers were getting thicker, and temperatures were dropping. Do we continue to Georgetown, or do we use the three and half hours of fuel we have left flying around central Texas looking for a hole to punch through or a higher temperature? After careful consideration, we chose the former. We would attempt the approach, and if we started getting icing again, we would go back up and look for possible diversions.

ATC gave us vectors and descent at our discretion. The cloud layer and temperatures did not look promising. Finally, we could not put off our descent any longer; we started down. Again, the OAT started dropping. We reached the cloud layer, and nothing was in our favor, so we started back up again. Then, almost out of nowhere, the cloud layer broke, and there was an opening right on the approach path. It was the first promising thing we had seen the whole flight, and we took it. We continued the approach, made an almost perfect landing, and went back inside to beat ourselves up in the debrief.

We learned many lessons on this flight, but the key takeaway was the unpredictability of the weather. Meteorology and weather theory are such massive parts of pilot training, especially in instrument training, yet nobody can say for sure what the conditions will be up in the air. All the risks associated with weather genuinely make it the most dangerous hazard to aviation. We spent well over an hour scouring through imagery, briefings, and pireps. We examined all the risks, assessed their severity, and still, we made a wrong decision. We should not have been in the air that day, no matter what the reports said or who else was sharing the sky with us. Sometimes, when there is a doubt, the best thing to do is cancel the flight. Had a hole not opened up for us on our approach, who knows where we would have ended up.

Preston Harrison is a CFII/MEI in Spring, Texas.