Walking on the Moon

As you may have seen form Brenda’s blog, we’re weathered in again in Midland, TX.

Go/No go decisions are really the hardest part of trips like this one. We spent yesterday hanging out in Frisco as a sizable cold front blew through Dallas – thunderstorms, tornadoes, the whole nine yards – and today was looking pretty good. The McKinney to Midland leg went pretty well, though we did have a solid, awful, 30-40 knot headwind the whole way, just like last time I flew this direction at this time of year.

We grabbed lunch and I set out to brief the (fairly short) hop to El Paso. Hurm. Icing airmet. And those headwinds. And there aren’t a lot of good choices for alternates out here in the middle of nowhere. I looked and thought a while and decided to stay put. These are always hard decisions to make, because I’m always worried that I’m being too conservative. I’ve made a conscious decision to fight that urge so I made the decision firmly and we decided to stop for the day.
This was a hard decsions to make because I do want to get home. Midland itself looked good, and much less threatening than the printed weather; maybe the El Paso situation was similarly overblown. But If it is as bad as it’s written, that would be a dangerous flight for the Archer, and if it’s worse, it would be a disaster.
However, I’m not beating myself up about the decision any more, because while we were waiting for a cab, I talked to a pilot who had come back after trying to get to El Paso and encountering ice en route. You have to make a fair number of these decisions, and usually there’s nothing more said on a no-go. it’s nice to hear I read the information correctly. Whew.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Aviation, blogbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.