Icy Tuesday

"There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."

-Col. Patrick Bowman, USAF

It's looking pretty bad out there, sports fans.

A winter wonderland if you're not going anywhere. A nightmare if you need to fly yourself to Florida in a few hours.

Yesterday's forecast for today called for a respite in the snow and ice, and maybe a window to fly back to Florida to prepare for this trial in a few days. Apparently someone's still working at the NWS during the shutdown, however, and we're looking at forecasts of moderate icing all the way from here to the southern tip of the Shenandoah Valley. And it's so damned cold out there that I can't fly below it--if I take the Mighty Columbia into a cloud from the surface on up to infinity, within a few seconds the ice will likely start to form. And even though the de-icing system on the plane does a fairly good job dealing with a momentary encounter with the frozen stuff, prolonged exposure can start to wreak havoc with the premise of continued flight. The answer in those situations usually mandates a descent below the freezing level, but as I said that's not an option today until I'm well south of here.

So what to do?

I'm defending a deposition in a little while, and the plan had been to ride over to the airport afterwards and make the two-hopper back to Florida. But what if that time arrives and it's still snowing, and there's still ice hiding in those clouds? If the ceiling is high enough I could fly low for a while and stay below it; if it's a low overcast with tops only a couple thousand feet high I could punch through the potential ice and fly in the clear on top.

But if neither is an option; well, that's when things get a little froggy. Wait and hope things improve? Start driving the 18 hours to get back? Push the whole exercise to Wednesday, and hope for the best? Take a chance that things at altitude aren't as bad as forecast, knowing there's a scenario in which things are in fact that bad, and there's no escaping the consequences?

If you don't read about me in the paper tomorrow, you'll know that last one didn't come to pass.

For over five years now I've been playing this game, sometimes barely threading the needle of racing back to Florida when we're up here and there's some event there that commands my presence. I've never begged off due to weather or mechanical failure, even on one occasion leaving a broken airplane in North Carolina and driving all night in a rental car to make a court appearance. Maybe my luck has finally run out, and the weather gods have presented an early season winter scenario that defies any solution short of driving two days each way at a moment in time when I can ill afford the 36 lost hours that entails.

Not great, Bob, not great at all.

And no way to live. But if I screw this up, I guess that won't be a problem.

Here we go. In the words of the late, great Karbo Kline, my squadron commander during WWIraq, let's do this thing.