Painted Cloudscapes to Saratoga Springs

Exploration

Some trips are simply made for light aircraft. 

Take, for example, our recent foray to Saratoga Springs, NY for a college visit. (Yes, The Bear has reached that age. How is that even possible?) We had a 9:30 am appointment to tour the college's interdisciplinary sciences building on Monday, September 25. We also had tickets to the theater in downtown Rochester the afternoon before, with the show expected to end shortly before 5:00 pm. Drive time to Saratoga Springs is 3.5 hours. By car, our options included a late arrival Sunday night or a very early departure Monday morning.

General Aviation to the rescue!

September 24: Cloudscapes

Date	Aircraft	Route of Flight	Time (hrs)	Total (hrs)
24 Sep 2023	N21481	SDC (Sodus, NY) - 5B2 (Saratoga Springs, NY)	1.9	2731.1

Even slowed by a 25 knot headwind, the airplane still saved time. After leaving the theater, we stopped for a quick dinner and continued on to the Williamson Sodus Airport. I had already fueled and readied the Warrior for departure, it was just a matter of pulling her out of the hangar.

From flight planning, I knew that we would experience rain, instrument meteorological conditions (IMC), and darkness. Mitigating factors included no risk of convection (thunderstorms) or icing at our cruise altitude of 5,000 feet and VFR conditions expected to prevail at Saratoga Springs for our landing. We departed Sodus VFR and contacted Rochester Approach for our instrument clearance. All went according to plan. 

However, I did not anticipate the radiantly fantastic environments that we would fly through en route to Saratoga Springs. Stunning views beyond our windows rendered me a speechless witness of nature's grandeur. It is one thing to view these cloudscapes from the ground, but quite another to be among them.

Slight obscuration between us and Sodus Bay.

See? We're having fun!

Farther east, we entered clouds that were generally smooth. We flew through some light rain, logging an hour of IMC time.

Eventually the sun set and the heavy overcast enveloped us in absolute darkness for the last 40 minutes of the flight. When I tuned the AWOS (automated weather observation system) at Saratoga Springs, the transmitter broadcast a repeating statement about the AWOS being unavailable. (We learned the next day that a circuit breaker for the weather sensing instrumentation tripped, but the transmitter still worked. It just didn't have any useful information to transmit.)

I requested the RNAV-5 instrument approach from Albany. As we maneuvered for the approach, we passed through an invisible rain shower in the darkness of sufficient vigor that the sound of rain ticking on the windshield penetrated our headsets. We broke out of the clouds and the rain well before the final approach fix and landed among lights lining the runway of an otherwise dark and deserted airport.

Ground team!

Fortunately -- and remarkably consistent with the forecast -- the rain stayed south of the airport. We worked together to bundle up the airplane and minutes later, we were travelling into downtown Saratoga Springs by Uber.

At the end of the day, we easily reached our destination in a timely manner by leveraging the versatility of our airplane to fly 0.6 and 1.0 hours at night and in IMC, respectively. Being instrument rated and current on instruments and night operations was obviously a factor. Better still, we had the unexpected treat of spectacular views as we flitted in and out of the clouds.

September 25: Having Our Druthers

The next day, we had a wonderful tour of the well-appointed, heavily wooded campus, including the science and music buildings that were of greatest interest to The Bear. We gathered good data as The Bear tries to winnow down her college choices. Saratoga Springs itself is an odd blend of college town and resort town, but overall seemed like a nice place. We had a terrific lunch at Druthers Brewing Company and, after a brief Uber ride back to the airport, we were airborne and headed for home. A tailwind shortened the ride to 1.2 hours (versus the 3.5 hour drive) as we surfed through the tops of the clouds (0.3 hours IMC). Like our family flights of old, The Bear was sound asleep in the back seat before we ever leveled off in cruise.

College. Yikes.

Enjoying lunch outside at Druthers Brewing Company.