Dodging the Snowflakes

Today, I woke up and it was a beautiful day. Cold, around 13°F this morning, but clear and sunny. So, I headed over to the airport and got the aircraft out and preflighted, sat around for about 1/2hr drinking coffee and shooting the breeze at the FBO, before I made a lesuirely pancake run to Carroll County (TSO) for some flapjacks, bacon, and eggs....what a perfect day....if only that is what had actually happened. It was a perfect morning for flying, calm winds, clear skies, but I had to be stuck in a meeting for the majority of the day. Yuck.

When 3:30PM rolled around, and my meeting was over, I booked it out of there to make a cross-country to visit my brother Sam up at Hillsdale. The plan was this: Fly up, chum around, get a couple of Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers, see the friends, catch up on some fun stuff, fly back that evening.

Well, it started out that way. The Alberta Clipper that was coming from the northwest was clipping along, beating all previous forecasts by a couple of hours. I grabbed this image from the radar composite at 11:18PM here, and it has really changed in the last couple of hours. The winds aloft were blistering along, which was probably really awesome if I was heading from Winnepeg to Baltimore and could grab a 120kt tail wind. However, I was heading directly into the face of the wind at 6500ft. Totally different picture.
We had a 32-35kt headwind directly in our face, which was making life slow and difficult. I considered dropping lower for more favorable winds, but we had just come from there, and my younger sister was in the back for one of her few aircraft trips, so I figured that it was better to stay in the most stable air up higher, than to bounce down in the inversion/windshear layer around 4500ft. I should've dropped lower. As you can see from the cockpit display (MFD), and the 9000ft winds aloft.... I've got an oppressive headwind dropping my groundspeed through the floor. It was rock solid, and no bouncy-bouncies, so that hopefully my sister will fly with me again someday:).

What a 32kt headwind looks like on the MFD

Right as we got to Toledo, I noted an extraordinary atmospheric phenomenon. It looked like a sun dog, but was directly beneath the sun. As I looked closer, it was sunlight reflecting off the slipstream of tiny snowflakes whizzing by. I took some photos, but it's not really representative of how awesome it looked. (Note to self - buy super expensive SLR digital camera with zoom lens. Hide from wife.) Well, once I saw snow, the visibility started to haze over, and we dropped down to 4500ft, then to 2500ft as we kept moving further and further underneath the shelf of the oncoming storm front.

Sun reflection off snow in slipstream

Reflection off snow in slipstream - As close as my camera allows.

It was a straight-in approach, and a rather hasty landing. Not my best one. In fact, my worst one to date in the DA40, but it was on the ground. I taxied over to the FBO, delivered a bottle of Belgium's Finest Saison beer (I really have no idea if it is good or not) to my brother, gave a quick hug, said "Sorry I can't stay, but the snow's coming in fast.", got back in the plane and high-tailed it for the barn. I like to think of this as a good route-proving trip. I proved that I can fly the route and work the communications like a pro. Well, I'm pretty slow on the readbacks, and I did call traffic at 3 o'clock, instead of 9 o'clock...but I did call traffic in sight! Speaking of traffic in sight...I had a close encounter with a Beech King Air doing approach practice. I could hear him say "Yeah...I've got them on TCAS" as the approach controller notified him of our presence at his 12 o'clock. I saw a tiny blip grow into a rapidly descending and banking King Air, as he passed about 1000ft below us. Pretty cool...and I am glad that he has TCAS, I have a transponder, and I called for radar service. The only bad thing is that I didn't have the aforementioned ultra-sweet digital SLR with a 300mm lens to catch the sun glinting off his canopy mid-bank. I know it would've been on the top 100 of all time at Airliners.net. We made it back safely, and put the plane back in the barn for another day of fun. I logged 3.1hrs, and 2 landings. Very cool.