By Rod Douglas 

Drought. Year in, year out. Stressing the farmers, creating water crises in the cities, killing the rivers. Bad news…Unless you’re a pilot.

For pilots, the last five years have seen clear skies and lots and lots of beautiful flying. Big wide skies, with only the occasional bumpy afternoon to contend with, as the long hot days caused climbing thermals that had us bumping across the sky.

But not this year. The storms are back. Huge fronts driving up from the Antarctic and across from the tight spinning epicentre of the West Australian cyclonic lows. The summer days of hitting the BOM site and discovering satellite images of wide skies and whopping big highs stationary over the desert are gone. Now you’re much more likely to jump onto the satellite and see the red outline of Australia split apart by a continent wide swoosh of white, tearing across the country the way Jackson Pollock throws a bucket of paint across a canvas.

I’ll never forget the first Instrument Rating check flight I took to convert my US rating across to my Australian license. The ATO checked my hours and looked at my total experience, then looked at my logged instrument time and proceeded to tell me that under no circumstances could my IMC be right. From memory it was a little over 10% of my logged time. When I assured him it was accurate I received an intense grilling to ensure that I actually understood what the definition of logged time in IMC was. Twenty minutes later he surrendered and accepted that I knew the definition and that he had to accept the time logged.

And under most circumstances he would have been right. In Australia we spend precious little time in IMC. It’s very different in the US where lots of my hours were logged. I don’t know how many trips I flew from San Diego to San Francisco where I’d depart in a P210, be in the Southern Californian clag at 1,500 ft, climb up to FL170 in superbly stable conditions, completely socked in cloud and stay there all the way only to pop out in San Francisco to a drizzly day a few hundred feet above minimums.

The south east was a whole lot different. Flights to Florida on hot stormy summers days would often see us picking our way around CU’s whose exploding anvils burst through 100,000 feet with unimaginable updrafts that would break any aircraft as soon as look at it.

Of course, the conditions that you live within become the conditions that you accept. Pretty much all the aircraft that I flew were ice protected with boots and weather radar, or at least a Stormscope to guide you. With pretty much contiguous radar, and helpful controllers, weather was just the part of the everyday life of a GA pilot. You could pretty much always find a path through and, if you had to cross a front with the in-cockpit tools, regular PIREP’s and the controllers radar, it became a team effort to beat the elements. Flights rarely got cancelled and you just got on with it.

That isn’t the way it is in Australia. I discovered it early upon my return when I’d blasted off one Sunday afternoon in a Duchess for a run down to Swan Hill with an ATO on board to get my Commercial and night tests done. We were going to do one on the way down and the other on the way back. The weather was pretty good when we left Coolie and the flight was uneventful as we pushed through to Dubbo. With full tanks and a quick check of the weather we departed knowing that we might need to cross a weak front somewhere around the border.

As we ran in towards the front it looked pretty benign. It was a winter front and slope and its colour gave me confidence that we’d punch through in fairly short order and that we shouldn’t have to deal with anything more than a little moderate turbulence. I discussed my strategy with the ATO, which was to vary the course to fly into the lightest of the cloud, got the 20 miles right of track clearance and set course.

I had a good mate of mine in the back who was a sailor. I let him know what we were going to do, told him we’d have some turbulence to deal with and confirmed that he was happy with the strategy and comfortable with the look of the weather ahead. In my experience it matters little if a man is a pilot or a sailor, they all have a healthy respect for the weather that makes them solid students of colour and form. He concurred and in we went.

With the autopilot on and two experienced pairs of hands lightly on the controls, the ride began. It got a little wild for a while but we stayed within the ±100 ft that was needed for me to pass the commercial test and within about 10 minutes we popped out the other side into smooth damp air a comfortable margin below the freezing level. We continued on to Swan Hill, shot a GPS RNAV approach and headed into town to settle into our motel with an agreement to meet at 7 pm for dinner.

Situation normal, right. Graham, my sailor mate and I got to the restaurant early and were chatting about the flight. It was the first time he’d flown with me and we were joking about the comparison between the weather we’d just flown through and the weather on a recent night when we’d been out on Morton Bay and got caught in a front that dragged the anchor and washed us up onto a sand bank. We’d both decided that pushing through a front at 140 knots was far preferable to weathering a front moving through on an anchored yacht.

Then the ATO turned up. He just about shocked the pants off me when he announced that our crossing of the front was ‘the worst bloody weather I’ve ever flown through’. With several thousand hours, all of which were flown in GA aircraft, I couldn’t believe my ears. He was adamant it was true.

Which just goes to show that one man’s bumpy ride can be another man’s terror.

I will say this for the Australian fleet. Very few of the light fleet are set up for weather flying. Boots, radar and even Stormscope’s seem to be seen as additional complexity and, therefore, addition cost when it comes to maintenance time. While this is undoubtedly true, it also means that, as a group, Australian GA pilots, and in particular private pilots, are probably poorly trained or prepared should we encounter weather.

There also seems to be a fundamental prejudice against turbo charged aircraft which is unique in world in Australia. The reality is that almost every aircraft starts life with a normally aspirated donk. Once well proven, the usual upgrade is to make a turbo charged version available. Next, the turbo outsells its normally aspirated cousin. Situation normal. Except in Australia. Why? Fundamentally we seem to believe that there is a lack of value in going high, or increasing performance in hot and high conditions.

Now it’s clearly true that Australia lacks the tall mountains of the US. It’s also true that we lack the amount of weather. But it’s also true that if you are going to use a private aircraft as a business tool you need the capability to fly in all but dangerous weather.

When I was flying the Mooney TLS, the embedded capability of the aircraft to climb straight into the flight levels, with TKS known ice protection and a capable panel, meant that I simply never had to cancel a leg. Better still was the knowledge that even if the weather was really crappy on the ground, I could almost always out climb the weather and then punch out and scoot along with the puffy pillows of white below me and vivid bright blue of the sky above. Give me that any day compared to the unknown of bumping along in the clag with no perspective, little capacity to really understand where the embedded storm cells are and no idea how long it would go on for.

A couple of occasions required me resting the the canula and dragging out the full mask as I headed to FL250. On one of those legs heading home I saw my fastest ever piston ground speed with 316 knots as I pushed into the bottom of the jet stream.

But back to this year’s genuine storm season.

I recently had a trip that absolutely tested me and had me reaching back into the past for the excellent training I received in the US around flying in storm season. Mike deSalvo was my mentor over there and with over 15,000 hours in GA equipment there wasn’t much Mike hadn’t flown and even less that he didn’t know about both the theory and practice of flying.

Mike was, and undoubtedly still is, a common sense man. He had some simple rules for storm season flying that came in part from a fundamental belief in quality, well-equipped aircraft (don’t fly them if they’re not) and a pilot’s capacity (and right) to make intelligent judgments for themselves.

His simple view was that while weather forecasts were the best guess for the future that a pilot would ever receive, they were just that. An educated guess. Mike had a pragmatic view. Being a commercial pilot was all about getting paid to safely and efficiently get the passengers from where they are, to where they want to be and that a pilot simply couldn’t do that sitting on the ground.

So simple common sense ruled. If the weather was good enough to depart and then make an approach and return to land, or if there is another airport that you could fly to and safely make an approach, then the best place to be was in the air. (This doctrine was generally applied to twins, but singles simply had higher minima’s applied to them).

Naturally this doctrine didn’t apply should there be convective storms in the locale of the airport, or when fronts or other significant weather changes were due.

So the routine was simple. File your plan. Depart if your personal weather minima allowed with the maximum fuel load available in the aircraft. Once airborne, use the actual information, combined with PIREP’s, controller input and the aircraft’s speed and agility to out run any weather system that was nearby, then manoeuvre as required around the weather to complete your mission.

A trip a few weeks ago had me absolutely testing my memory and decision-making capacity. The mission was straight forward. I was due to attend a meeting in Dunkeld, Victoria. Nearest airport was Hamilton. Passengers, two. Hamilton was on the limit of the range of the Cirrus G3 that I’d be making the trip in and with three solid blokes aboard, flying light on fuel made sense and was required to stay within MTOW.

We left Archerfield with max fuel allowing for us to fly to Armidale to pick up Ken and keep going. I knew we’d probably need a fuel stop unless everything went right or we were willing to fly best economy the whole way as the winds were well and truly against us. I filed ARM direct Hamilton, but our track would take us within coooeee of Dubbo and a 24 hour swipe bowser to top the tanks.

The only challenge with this flight was the week of freaky storms that had hit Brisbane and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Our departure on Thursday was to be towards the predicted end of the weather system but my expectation was that we would be weather challenged.

Adding to the complexity was the fact that the aircraft, Lima Romeo Juliet was doing a charter to Longreach which would keep us from departing until 4.30 pm. One of deSalvo’s other simple rules for summer storm flying is ‘the earlier, the easier’.  A late afternoon departure, into the tail of a large system was sure to bring challenges.

We departed on time with good conditions at Archerfield. Clear skies but with significant CU build ups to the west and south. The line looked pretty solid but I knew that I was departing with plenty of light left, big Avidyne screens equipped with Stormscope, traffic and terrain and, being a GTS, TKS weeping wings should we need it.

The TKS weeping wing system, which was originally developed in World War 2, is an excellent, simple system for ice protection on light aircraft. It relies on a titanium leading edge cuff with thousands of microscopic holes through which the glycol that provides the ice protection ‘weeps’. A single pump provides standard rate distribution of anti-ice, while if the going gets tough you can switch to max rate which delivers a higher rate of flow. When I was flying the TLS there were so few of the systems around that I had to mix the anti-ice fluid myself.

Over the past few years that’s started to change. Cirrus introduced the system as a part of their GTS package and a number of them have been bought into the county. Mooney still have the only known icing package for their airframe, with the balance of the manufacturers only offering the system as emergency solution.

One of the interesting aspects of this type of system versus a ‘boots’ approach, or even the ‘Evade’ electric system that was used for a while on the Columbia 350 and 400 is the requirement for the system to have the consumables available before use. In the Mooney, a full anti-ice tank cost 26 lbs of payload and I would typically leave the tank about half full so that I had the safety available without the full weight penalty.

We departed with about a quarter of a tank of de-ice which was less than I would have chosen but better than nothing. Once we were in the air, the MFD lit up with the wonderful little golden crosses that indicate lightning strikes. It was clear that we would be working hard to complete the first leg to Armidale. The first decision was whether our most likely path through would be to fly west and around the storms or to head direct, knowing that we would always head east and work our way down the coast before heading inland. We set out direct and worked our way up the valley over Kooralbyn.

Once in the air the perspective on the storms changed. From the ground an incoming line of storms looks like a solid towering mass. Once in the air, the nuances become clear: differing colours, clear alleys, tops that boil versus the flat blown away tops that you know will give you a smooth ride through. As we started punching through I began testing my passenger Jim’s tolerance for weather.

One thing that I’m determined never to do is to put a single person off flying. Different things scare different people and hard experience has taught me that you need to probe to understand people’s tolerance to the excitement that we pilots thrive upon. For some people the thought of being in the air and at the mercy of the air (particularly the bumps) is too much for them. I would only take them flying on a still early winter’s morning. For others it’s all good as long as they are clear of cloud and can see where they’re going. Others love being in the air but don’t much like the transitions.

Fortunately I’d flown with Jim before and in some weather, so I knew before we took off that he would be a good passenger. That didn’t stop me from putting in place an agreement with Jim that if he didn’t feel confident and comfortable then we’d land at the nearest airport and wait out the storms even if that meant making an after midnight run down to Hamilton.

Now Jim has in a past life been a racing car driver, so I had a high level of confidence that he would accept whatever ride the weather gods gave us. It didn’t stop me asking whenever things got a little rough – “Jim are you feeling confident and comfortable?” I was to ask this question a lot of the next couple of days. Jim’s consistent response was –“As long as you are Rod”. It’s one of the real privileges of being a pilot is to be trusted by your passengers and, for every privilege, there is always a responsibility – in this case to make decisions based first on safety.

The meeting we were going to – Jim’s last as national president of Greening Australia - was important to both of us. But not important enough to take any unacceptable risks for.

We worked through the first line of weather and it was pretty rough. Moderate turbulence in warm rising air. A quick call to center for a PIREP over Laravale resulted in a negative response but the helpful addition of his view that there was a line of storms more significant than that which we’d just crossed had me quickly re-planning to the south. I selected a track based on the lightning activity that was direct Casino direct Coffs Harbor in the hope of running around the back of the storm and up into Armidale.

As we headed south east, the Stormscope started to clear a little but the cloud became significantly denser. About this time I heard a report from a Virgin on descent into Ballina that the overcast topped out at FL150 with CU tops through to FL250. Oh how I wished that someone had bolted on a TurboAlley turbo to my trusty stead.  Life is so much easier if you can put yourself above the clag and fly around the tops.

Right then we flew into significant storm cell. No activity on the Stormscope but a hell of a ride. One of deSalvo’s first principals of storm flying was always take the most direct route out. Inevitably that is always back out the way you came. In the Cirrus, with its excellent S-TEC 55X, hand flying a 180 degree turn using the altitude hold function to support straight and level and following it with the heading bug in heading mode had us quickly turned around and flying back to where we entered the storm. While I was doing that I heard a Metroliner call in that they were on descent into Lismore and visual. I made a quick decision to make for Lismore knowing that we could get down, or alternatively keep tracking coastal.

There is nothing nicer after 45 minutes of battling weather than to find a nice big hole with an airport in the bottom of it. Having had enough of the clag for a while I decided to descend and see what it looked like under the overcast. In a large spiral we descended until we got below the ceiling which was at about 2,500 ft. There were plenty of squally rainstorms about all of which were easily seen. After a quick check in with Jim I headed for the beach.

There was a fair bit of turbulence down low, but at least I could see. Avoiding the rain showers wasn’t difficult and before long we were tracking down the coast at 2,000 ft. First order of business – check that Evans Head was deactivated. Last thing we needed was a fast jet on a bombing run creating more turbulence!

Flying in storm season is about strategic decision making. You undoubtedly have less information than you would choose to have, although it’s a damn site more than Smithy or all those other pioneers who have walked this path before us, and you need to manage uncertainty. It’s the capacity to do so that makes for a good pilot. As we ran down the coast to Coffs there was significant lightning activity to the west of Coffs and it looked to me like we might have been spending some time on the ground.

Coffs Harbour sits at that point on the continent where the Great Divide comes closest to the coast. Undoubtedly it’s where the weather collides with the coast and it acts like a funnel pushing the storm fronts out to sea. If you can get safety past Coffs then the trip either North or South will usually be successful. As we ran in I received our clearance into the zone from Coffs tower and requested a head up on the weather radar. The report that came in suggested that it looked as if the storms were breaking up to the west.

As we came around the corner of the Great Divide, the sky to the west looked promising. We started the climb back up and headed direct to Armidale. While there was some manoeuvering to do compared to what we’d just been through, it was a walk in the park. As we crossed the escarpment the sky was beautiful and the air had been washed crystal clean in the way only an intense storm can do. We landed into the pink of the twilight. After a leg stretch and a loo break we picked our passenger up and departed for the rest of what was to become a long flight to Hamilton with a fuel stop in Dubbo. While it took a while, it was spectacularly uninteresting compared to the intense decision-making required of the storm flying that was needed to get to Armidale.

The meeting was very successful. We were due to depart Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately the other great summer storm challenge for Australian pilots was moving in. This is the intense low that moves up from the south bringing the intensely cold air from Antarctica. When compared to the moist hot air of the northern storms that we’d faced on the way down, this challenge was both more challenging because of the potential of ice and simpler to deal with as the weather system rarely moves much north of the border.

Based on the BOM forecast Jim and I decided to skip the site visits and get home before the next predicted storms blew in to Brisbane. The expected weather was for an intense low to stall over the Grampians. We headed to the airport around 9 am with a line of weather moving fairly quickly through. We quickly refuelled the aircraft and I made a snap decision that we should get away before a rapid moving line of storms came through.

As we climbed out it was fairly clear that these storms were going to have a different nature to them. Very little Stormscope activity but still a fair bit of turbulence and the air was very cold. At 9,000 ft, OAT was reading -10°C and there was plenty of moisture around. About now I decided that I would really like to have a full tank of de-icing fluid. The Cirrus installation is not certified for flight into known icing and I had no intention of spending any time as a test pilot exploring the boundaries of performance of a Cirrus in icing conditions.

We’d been flying for about 15 minutes and had popped in an out of a number of banks of clouds when entry into the next one got my attention. The turbulence came first followed almost immediately by freezing rain that immediately started to build ice on the wings and windscreen. De-ice on at max rate and a 180° turn took us back out the way we came in. Ice is an incipient challenge for pilots. In Australia, where ice is rarely encountered, it has a deservedly fearsome reputation.

For me, in an aircraft that’s not certified for flight into icing, once you’ve encountered ice you need to find a way around it. There are fundamentally only two options. Descend to a level where ice won’t form or stay out of the clouds. Of course, there are clouds which don’t contain enough water to form ice but if you can pick them apart ‘you’re a better man than me Gungajin’.

As we were still over the high country of the Grampians and we’d just taken off and knew that the ceiling was at best 1500 ft AGL, the only real option was to find some clear air and then descend to lowest safe. By now I’d got Jim to pull out the laptop and get the BOM site up so we could at least have a look at the radar returns. Telstra’s 3G network means that most of the populated country is covered so, once I’d discovered that Jim had a 3G wireless card, we’d decided we’d use it for supplementary weather. I wish I had known that on the leg down. (By the way, I’ve since switched providers from Vodafone to Telstra and I can tell you it makes a difference to be able to have live weather in the cockpit.)

The radar returns indicated that we were in the north western sector of the weather and that, if we could pick our way directly north, then it was very likely that we’d pop out into the clear. I decided that the safest route would be direct Horsham at lowest safe then directly north up to Swan Hill before tracking to Dubbo for fuel. With lots of help from centre with clearance left and right of track we picked our way through the storms to Horsham and the headed north towards Swan Hill. Fairly quickly the clouds started to break up and we were able to climb higher and 30 nm short of Swan Hill we were able to turn direct Dubbo.

The rest of the flight was fairly uneventful if a little turbulent. With 40 knot tail winds it was a much shorter flight home.

So what does it tell us about storm season flying? First, the aircraft. How capable is it? Next the pilot. How experienced are you? Finally the tactics. It’s a must to have a clear plan and an absolute commitment to stopping at any point where it all gets a bit much. If you fly into a cell, the shortest way out is always the way you went in.

Finally, what’s the nature of the weather? Up north it’s the cumulonimbus that will kill you. Down south it’s the ice. For my money I’d say that storm season flying is something that is best learnt from someone very experienced with a pragmatic approach to surviving.

It’s reminded me of just how lucky I was to have lived in the US where the weather really does make all of ours look benign and that I was even more privileged to have flown and been mentored by deSalvo, the ultimate pragmatist.

Fly lots, fly safe and remember: experience comes from every safe challenge well survived.