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Yesterday was my first "real" solo cross-country, and right away I had to deal with the weather, which is to say clouds. The biggest impression was how tempting it was to get into trouble. I read accident reports of continuing VFR into deteriorating weather before and always wondering if those pilots were retards. It turned out the kind of activity that is difficult to understand without actualy doing.

Here is what it looked heading 210 from Las Vegas (LVS) towards Sandia:

It may not look like much, but the problem here is that a student cannot simply climb over the cloud bank legally. The rulebook says "must maintain visual contact with the ground at all times". The danger in doing it is two-fold. Firstly, if any problem with powerplant develops, you go into soup which may be touching the surface. I heard about people surviving this sort of thing in Iowa, but this is New Mexico. Secondly though, what are you going to do when you reach your destination and cannot descend? Answer: declare an emergency and get your certificate possibly yanked when the facts came out.

Going under it is no answer in New Mexico either. It could be doable, but there are no guarantees. I ended doing it eventually, see below.

Let's look at zooms. First, right:

The original plan called for heading to Santa Fe (SAF). One look tells us that it's a very bad idea. So that plan was nixed. But what now?

The safest idea would probably be to deviate left. I had 3.5 hours of fuel onboard by that time, and the terrain east of Sandia is as flat as Kansas. Still... I have never been there and did not study the area... Airfields there are rare, and fields with gas pumps are even rarer.

In the end I decided to take a little peek by climbing and found that the cumulus bank was very narrow. I jumped over it and then under the stratos on the other side, from where the Sandia pass was clearly visible.

To amuse myself, I listened to AWOS at Moriarty (0E0) and found that their runway only had 3500 ft available. Presumably that was how much they cleared from snow. Good thing that pass was open and I didn't have to divert.

Was this a good ADM? I will probably not know until much later, if ever. The pass apparently was clearing periodically, then tightening up again (I found later that my instructor left me a voicemail advising not to attempt it). There was a good chance that clouds would push me down[1] or make me deviate towards the great empty plains. I am sure thousands of people make these decisions every day, and nobody ever knows how that worked out until NTSB report. While I was in touch with LVS, I heard a Skylane reporting an arrival from the southwest, e.g. about where I was going. He made all the calls but I never saw him.

[1] That is, down until I become the CFIT statistic that Chris discussed coincidentially.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at 12:53 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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