phik

You would think, considering how much I complain about the rain in Boston, that it would be fairly easy for me to get good instrument conditions. This summer, though, it seems to oscillate between severe clear and thunderstorms — even though those mythical thunderstorms never actually drop any lightning in Cambridge where I can enjoy it.

Today, at last, was excellent. Forecast ceilings around 600 feet, no thunderstorms, reasonable winds, light turbulence. Even the drizzle stopped at the airport, so I didn’t have to preflight in rain gear.

FlightAware, great service though it may be, turns out to be pretty useless for these local flights. The tracks are 8 and 17 minutes long which, thinking back, are right about when I started getting vectors from ATC. I’m not sure why that affects anything, because it’s not like I change transponder codes or cancel IFR.

Given the FlightAware failure, I’m pleased that this cheap little GPS tracker is working out reasonably well. It took a bit of tinkering, and I don’t think it’s as accurate as the Garmin that Stuart had in Australia, but I only notice when I’m moving really slowly, like walking around town.

Even today’s conditions weren’t quite perfect IMC; the tops of the clouds ended up being down around 2800, so I spent most of the en-route portion VFR-on-top.

On the other hand, the weather was great for approaches almost down to minimums, breaking out around 400′ above-ground each time.

Pease Tower gave me an altitude warning just as I was breaking out, which made me a little nervous — those are usually the last words you read about in an NTSB transcript before they start counting bodies — though neither John nor I saw anything wrong. We were right where we should have been, still 100′ above the minimum for that approach, altimeter set correctly. We could see the trees below us at that point, so it ceased to be a big deal. Maybe it was a high-strung trainee, or maybe the radar was showing something different.

Start getting used to tracks that aren’t arrow-straight between my origin and destination; that’s just not how IFR flight works.