Driftless | Part 8, Phantom Weather

"Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends, Once More"

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
08 Aug 2022	N21481	LSE (La Crosse, WI) - BTL (Battle Creek, MI) - PTK (Waterford, MI)	4.2	2508.0

Climbing away from La Crosse, WI.

After the oppressive gloom of the morning, including flying through clouds so thick that not even the Warrior's wingtips were visible, the view from on top of the clouds at 7,000 feet seemed unreal. I am often struck by this after climbing above the murk, by the retina-stinging brightness of the sun's reflection from clouds below and the beautiful, severe blue crispness of the heavens. After a morning acclimated to shadows, rising above it all triggered a momentary bout of disbelief. How could this still be the same planet, let alone the same day?

We were charging toward a broken line of thunderstorms. Uplinked weather radar depicted ghosts of the storm’s recent past. At 7,000 feet above the cloud layer, we were visual and it was my plan to visually avoid significant buildups as we approached the cold front from the back side.

Closer, the air took on a denser, hazier quality and the distant horizon became less distinct. Roughly thirty minutes from intercepting the weather displayed in ForeFlight, I noted that the radar had not updated in several minutes. 

I power cycled both the Sentry ADS-B receiver and the iPad, but the system failed to show an updated radar picture when everything came back online. Perusing some of the menus within ForeFlight while HAL kept the Warrior on course and altitude, I discovered a list of update times for various weather products available by ADS-B (technically, FIS-B). All were current within the last few minutes except for radar, which showed outages for national and all local radar imagery.

Oh, super. 

Not that uplinked ADS-B radar data should be used for tactical storm avoidance; it displays recent history at best. But it provides tremendously useful trending information. Are there storms? Are they moving? Which way? How fast? Is the precipitation diminishing or growing in intensity? We were now missing this vital information.

Where did all the towering cumulus go?

I squinted through the haze ahead, but could discern no buildups against the fuzzy horizon. I queried Chicago Center about any weather their radar was painting along our direction of flight. "Light precip only," came the reply.

Really?

Kristy and I exchanged looks but plunged on. We reached a chart position where ForeFlight depicted a raging thunderstorm cell from forty minutes earlier. There was nothing present and no buildups in sight to mark where the storm had ambled off to.

Chicago Center helpfully provided some shortcuts from my original route as we worked our way around the southwest quadrant of Chicago between La Crosse, WI and Battle Creek, MI. We remained VFR the whole way and never encountered a single cumulus buildup. The most weather we encountered was a light spritzing somewhere between Gary and South Bend, IN. As we transitioned from flying primarily south to primarily east, the cyclonic flow from a low pressure system over central Michigan enhanced our groundspeed significantly.

Weirdly, the weather simply ran out of energy and evaporated before we reached it. At the start of the day, that storm system was so extensive and severe that I initially decided not to fly and now it was gone. Utterly baffling, but also fortuitous.

Battle Creek was in the bag. Beyond that, we would have to see.

Once through the former position of the storm front, ADS-B weather radar came back online after an approximately one hour outage.

Of course.

Flatlands

This time, we flew directly over the CenterPoint Intermodal Center near Joliet, IL. Perhaps I found it so fascinating because there was not much down there to look at otherwise.

Case in point. Obviously, we were somewhere over Indinois.

Navistar Proving Grounds, New Carlisle, IN.

West of South Bend, IN.

South Bend, IN.

As we turned northeast toward Battle Creek, ADS-B radar depicted a few active cells east of us that were also visually evident. This weather held the potential to block all paths home and we would need to watch it carefully. But at 3:30 in the afternoon, second breakfast had long since been burned for energy and WACO Kitchen was more prominent in our minds than getting home. Getting home was not a "now" problem, it was an "after lunch" problem.

Passing south of Kalamazoo, MI with KAZO visible north of Austin Lake.

Still feeling the effects of the low pressure center to the north, we sped across the ground at 164 knots! Great Lakes Approach insisted we fly the RNAV 31 instrument approach into Battle Creek Executive despite the fact that I could see the airport the entire time. The long slog to runway 31 was against a gusty 30+ knot wind that repeatedly jolted our airplane all the way through to touchdown.

Great Food with a Side of Biplanes

At 3:30 on a Monday afternoon, we obviously missed the lunch rush. Warrior 481 was the only aircraft on the WACO / Centennial ramp.

On the WACO / Centennial ramp with KBTL tower in the background.

Warrior 481 viewed from WACO Kitchen.

It was my third visit to WACO Kitchen, Kristy's second (we stopped en route to Chicago in 2021 during a trip that I never wrote about), and The Bear's first. She and Kristy ordered the WACO Tacos while I had the Biplane Burger. I think it's fair to say that The Bear is now a fan.

Seeing me take a picture of The Bear, our waitress kindly volunteered her services as photographer.

Reviewing the weather, my fears from the start of the day were confirmed. There were significant thunderstorm cells active in a line from just southeast of Battle Creek to Cleveland that effectively shut off the route home south of Lake Erie. East of Detroit, additional cells of convective weather blocked the route east over Ontario, Canada.

New plan: the weather looked good as far as my home town on the east side of Michigan. We would fly an hour east to Oakland County International, land, and re-assess. If the weather broke up or dissipated during that time, we could consider pressing on for home. If not, well, we knew our way around over there.

I love this shirt.

On the way out, we paused to admire the treasures in the WACO hangars.

These amphibious YMF-5s go for something like $750,000. That is a lot of money for a toy lacking the basic practicality of my boring old Spam can. Still...what a toy!

I was particularly taken with this Junkers parked amidst the collection of WACOs. I wondered about its story. I found a picture of it taken at Oshkosh just a couple of weeks before, but could not otherwise locate much information about it. Because I could not find it included in a list of surviving Junkers of this model, I wondered if it was a reproduction.

Homeward Bound

Well sated from an excellent late lunch, we launched IFR from Battle Creek and fought the turbulent low level wind until climbing above the clouds beyond its reach. After an hour, we let down toward Oakland County International with Detroit Approach vectoring us around for sequence into the traffic flow. For a Monday evening, the airport was busy.

Back at Michigan Aviation, I sat down in the revamped lobby and perused the weather again. There was no need to dwell on it long. A swath of red dominated the weather radar from Toledo to northeast of Toronto, so long and uniformly red that it seemed as though the weather map had been slashed and was bleeding out.

"We're staying here," I announced to my family within 30 seconds of sitting down to inspect the radar.

Ready to stay the night in Clarkston, MI for the first time since I sold Mom's house.

Michigan Aviation provided the same Buick courtesy car that we used for the lunch run to Hilltop a week prior (it felt more like a month). We booked a room at the relatively new Comfort Inn & Suites on Sashabaw Road near Pine Knob, which raised two key thoughts for me. The first was delight at actually seeing the Pine Knob Music Theater restored to its proper name! (I read about it in the news, but was pleased to see it firsthand.) The second was baffled wonderment at why it took so long for someone to realize that a hotel at an I-75 exit near Pine Knob would be a smart business venture.

We were checked into the hotel by 6:00. As soon as I sat down on the bed, the weight of all the mental activity throughout the day crashed down on me with suffocating fatigue. I had no inkling that I was so exhausted until I was suddenly no longer responsible for everyone's well-being in the air. Flying IFR is largely a mental game, but rarely have I felt its toll the way I did that night. Between the hard IFR flight to La Crosse that morning, the decision making around flying homeward and the subsequent scramble after a rare reversal in strategy, worries about navigating a line of weather that evaporated before we reached it, and concerns about whether to press on for home or stop, I was mentally exhausted. I could hardly believe that I saw the new AOPA sweeps airplane and held the door for a failed gubernatorial candidate earlier that same day. Surely that was yesterday. Heck, maybe those things happened to someone else.

Being back in my hometown, a multitude of places to visit or people to see came to mind. This was in contrast to dwelling on all of the doors that were closed as I did during the last visit. The desire was there. Really, it was. But I was just so tired. Instead, we stayed in the room and watched The Incredibles. I fell soundly asleep before it ended.

 

Which Way to ADRIE?

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
09 Aug 2022	N21481	PTK (Waterford, MI) - SDC (Sodus, NY)	2.8	2510.8

The next morning, after a wholly underwhelming hotel breakfast, we launched IFR from Oakland County International, climbed through the clouds to 7,000 feet, and turned toward New York using the ADRIE T781 DERLO T608 WOZEE route that I favored in 2018.

Last shot of Oakland County International while climbing away at 8:00 am.

"Cherokee Four Eight One, what's the on course heading to ADRIE?" Detroit queried. I guess some things never change. Clearly, the intersection remains underutilized despite my efforts to popularize it.

Cloud surfing over the Mitten.

Flying along I-69.

Throughout the flight home, cloud layers came and went.

Over Ontario, Canada.

Cloud streets forming west of London, ON.

By the time we passed London, Ontario the cloud layer below was completely solid and remained that way to Sodus. Feeling that I had leaned on the the autopilot enough on the day prior, I hand flew the entire route from Pontiac, MI to Sodus, NY including the RNAV 28 approach down to 1,000 feet above the ground.

See? I still got it!

We landed in Sodus during a light rainfall and went through the usual post-trip machinations of swapping the car out of the hangar for the airplane and cleaning a week's worth of accumulated insect carcasses from the leading edges of the wings.

And in Summary...

In 25.6 hours of flying, 3.6 of them in IMC, I flew four instrument approaches (2 logged, LSE and SDC), visited 5 states (3 new), and landed at 9 airports (5 new). I managed to drive quite a variety of cars over the week including a Buick, a Mazda, a Dodge, a Chevy, a Hyundai, and a Cadillac. During the trip, I exceeded 2500 hours total time and 100 hours for the year. I got to land on turf (Y51), an island (LSE), and at three places where we used to live (PTK, AZO, BMG). I saw four former houses, the newest AOPA sweepstakes airplane, and a fully restored F-117 Nighthawk partially held together by a few rivets that I personally placed last year. We were privileged to see the rest of the family for the first time in a year. I returned home with my vocabulary enhanced ("driftless"), additional instrument flying experience, improved knowledge of upper Midwest geography, and an armful of fastidiously maintained research notebooks from which my younger self wrote a dissertation. The latter are quite a time capsule. And this was quite a trip.