In early October, Mark and I were working on one of our cars in my hangar when my buddy Frank wandered over to say hi. He mentioned in passing that he might have an open seat in the HondaJet for a trip the following Monday, so I told him that while I had the mid Sunday into Monday, if the seat was open I'd gladly take it. (I mean, who needs sleep to live?) I didn't hear anything for a few days and figured he found someone else for the flight...until I got a text that Sunday evening as I was getting ready to head to work. "8am departure tomorrow if you'd like to ride along". Of course I would!! :)
The weather was pretty cruddy when Frank and I met the next morning, to the point that he pushed the departure back an hour. The remains of a tropical storm had pushed through the area overnight; while it wasn't raining anymore, the clouds were still pretty low and the winds were howling. I was looking forward to seeing how the jet handled the weather.
We got our IFR release and taxied out for takeoff. Bye HWY...see you later!
It didn't take long to climb up into the soup...
...and we flew through a few layers as we made our way to the west. First stop: Wheeling, WV (HLG).
I knew that our routing would take us through one of the sectors I work, so I explained to Frank what they would be doing with us and was looking forward to seeing who was working so I could say hi (especially since it was mostly my crew that was working that morning). Turns out my former trainee was training on the sector, and when I heard him reading a full route clearance to someone going to Norfolk, I knew he was probably swamped. (That specific sector works the airspace west of Dulles, and I don't think I've ever sent someone to Norfolk from there!). I laughed as we tunneled underneath an arrival without a traffic call, and laughed some more when my friend (the trainer) took over the frequency and started talking. After a couple minutes he switched us over to Washington Center (ZDC) and we continued on.
We popped out of the clouds as we climbed into the low 20s, and the view was pretty fantastic. You can see some of the clouds from the storm system back behind the wing.
One of the center controllers gave us a shortcut to Wheeling...
...and after what seemed like minutes, it was time to descend back into the soup.
We shot the GPS approach into HLG, and it seemed like we descended forever before we finally popped out of the clouds. You can just make out the runway ahead. Not exactly a great day!
Stuff like this makes me wonder why anyone would ever think it's a good idea to scud run, especially if there's any terrain in the area. At any rate, Frank landed just fine, and we taxied to the FBO to pick up the passengers.
The ramp was pretty empty when we got there, but that wasn't a surprise, given the weather. We wound up having to wait a little while for the passengers; Frank's phone had been eating text messages all morning, so they didn't know what time he was coming until we actually got to HLG. Oops!
We passed part of the time by watching this STAT medivac helicopter arrive. Turns out they had an incubator with a little preemie baby on board; the weather was too crummy to get into the hospital, so an ambulance met them on the ramp. After the ambulance left, I spent a little while talking to one of the pilots; turns out he occasionally flies the STAT helicopters in my airspace! We had fun talking shop about the airspace and procedures around DC. :)
Our passengers arrived a little while later, and after getting them loaded up and comfortable, it was time to head to our next stop: Boston (BOS)!
Bye, HLG!
It didn't take very long to climb up through the layers to the clear skies above.
While the weather was nice where we were, it wasn't so nice where we were going. You could see the storm system making its way through the East Coast. The ride had been mostly smooth so far, but between the occasional bumps and the climb through the clouds, one of our passengers wasn't feeling the greatest. I felt bad for him, but at least we had a bit of a tailwind so we could get them to Boston a little faster.
Frank and I spent a good chunk of the flight chatting, scanning for traffic (like this guy that passed a few thousand feet above us), and trying to convince the center controllers that no, we could not fly the specific RNAV arrival they kept trying to assign. We couldn't figure out why it wasn't in the plane's database, and Frank was hitting the point where he was about to just program it all in manually, when I saw it: the mandatory speed on one part of the arrival was faster than the HondaJet can physically fly. No wonder it wasn't in the database! Once we told the controllers that, they finally stopped trying to assign it.
We had enjoyed the mostly nice ride so far, but we were getting closer to the weather (and Boston), and we knew we'd have to say goodbye to the blue skies soon.
The areas of yellow on the previous picture are in those slightly raised clouds on the left. We stayed above the weather as long as we could...
...but we had to descend eventually.
To be continued...
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