AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2014 - 91

4.625" W x 10" H

was near the airplane's service ceiling! I
was weaving between and around towering cumulus clouds that were now well
above me, and in increasingly aggressive
turbulence.
Then flight service broadcast a convective sigmet. I was in the middle of the
coverage area, and things weren't looking good at all. I'd soon be descending for
vectors into Lunken, and wouldn't be able
to stay out of the ever-darkening clouds
for much longer-and the sun was going
down. It would be a night ILS into lowering ceilings, based on Lunken's ATIS.
A big problem was descending without
simultaneously building airspeed. I asked,
and was cleared, to make what amounted
to large S-turns-now on instruments-
so I could more easily shed altitude. The
turbulence got worse. Then it began to
rain, harder and harder, so loud that I
could barely make out ATC. So I kept
turning up the speaker volume. Did I
mention that I didn't have a headset? (No
general aviation pilots seemed to use them
back then).
It seemed to take forever, but I wound
up on the ILS and landed in good order,
just as the sun was setting. But while taxiing in, you could tell that real trouble was
brewing. Surface winds came in huge,
shifting gusts, shaking the 152 and making it hard to steer. The skies above were
churning. There was thunder. Then lightning. A helpful lineman directed me to a
hangar, and we pushed the Cessna in just
as torrents of rain and hail came down.
He said we were under a tornado watch.
I went to the terminal building, ate at
the Sky Galley, then slept on a bench in
the lobby. The next day I'd be at Leesburg.
What did I learn? That flying on top
has its downsides. That weather flying in
an autopilot-less, transponder-less, radiochallenged, underpowered Cessna 152 is
like fighting Mother Nature with a very
small stick. That the weather can go from
bad to worse in a shockingly short period
of time. And that you shouldn't let convective cloud tops force you higher and
higher-unless there's a safe path behind,
you'll just have to come back down
through them.
AOPA
EMAIL tom.horne@aopa.org

www.aopa.org/pilot AOPA PILOT | 91

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AOPA Pilot Magazine - March 2014

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