Category Archives: Flying

I had extremely vivid and bizarre dreams last night, a very busy day doing some business consulting and catching up on a bunch of our own accounting, it’s late, and I still haven’t posted anything today.

So have some cool pictures! In fact, pictures taken one day I was flying and we ran into a bit of weather.

The pictures were taken by my flight instructor using my camera on December 16, 2008. We flew out of Whiteman in Pacoima to do some practice on “ground reference maneuvers” such as turns around a point and S-turns. We flew out to our usual practice area over Simi Valley to get our work in.

I thought we wouldn’t be flying due to the scattered showers, but part of the lesson was also about the weather and the regulations. The cloud base wasn’t that low, the showers weren’t heavy enough so that we couldn’t see, so we were legal all the way. It was good experience for flying in less-than-perfect weather and getting a feel for what was “legal but marginal” weather just in case I ever get caught in it in the future.

A Cessna 172 doesn’t have windshield wipers. You’re flying at about 90 to 100 knots and the wind will keep the windshield fairly clear, but you can see the streaks on the glass.

Headed back home, we’re at about 2,500 feet or so coming east through the Santa Suzanna Pass back into the San Fernando Valley. We clearly have more than ten miles’ visability and the cloud base is up around 5,000 feet, so we’re legal, if wet. This is about the point on the way back where we call Van Nuys (sort of visible far off in the distance on the right edge of the picture) to get clearance to transition through their airspace to Whiteman.

This sequence shows us coming in to land at Whiteman on Runway 12:

The other day I talked about flying and mentioned that while I prefer the left-hand seat in the very, VERY first row, when flying commercially I always try to get a window seat.

From our trip last week from Norfolk (ORF) to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW), when there was some significant storm activity across the Appalachian Mountains, with some BIG thunderstorm cells popping up over Kentucky and Tennessee.

After we got to DFW I looked up this image from FlightAware.com. The green line is our flight track. Pay attention to that big red blob on the radar just north of the Alabama line, about a hundred miles southwest of Nashville.

Flying southwestward from ORF to DFW:

This storm front went from Florida to New York and was causing flash flooding throughout central Virginia and into DC. It was “exciting” (i.e., bumpy & turbulent) climbing through it. (I love “exciting” flying, Ronnie not so much – one of the reasons that she’s The Long Suffering Wife.)

Can you see the southbound jet (bright white dot) right above center in the gap between the two lines of clouds? He was probably 10K feet below us and descending, possibly into Atlanta.

Sometimes with a lot of clouds & showers around an a late afternoon sun and the right course, you can get lucky and see a rainbow in a shower below you.

Way over on the right, we start to see that really big thunderhead over Tennessee, climbing through the altitude that all of the other thunderheads were topping out at and building its signature anvil shape much higher, maybe at 50,000 feet or more. That’s a lot of energy, that’s a lot of danger. We were kept a long way away from it for a reason.

A second rainbow spotted today.

Here you can clearly see how much higher that one convection cell rises compared to all of the other activity in the area.

Off in the middle distance, just to the left of that monster supercell, a third rainbow of the day from a small cell that’s dumping a shower over northwest Tennessee.

And THAT‘s why I like having a window seat!! It may not be low earth orbit, but it’s probably as close as I’m going to get this year. (As always, I’m more than willing to talk any time to any one who can prove me wrong on that last point.)