Old Adage for Pilots Still Applies: See and Avoid

It was March 1979. I was a 25-year-old newly instrument-rated pilot flying from Charleston, South Carolina (KCHGS), to Langley AFB (KLFI near Hampton, Virginia. I was flying a 1976 Piper Cherokee Archer that was part of the AFB Aero Club.

The Cherokee was well equipped for its day. Dual nav/comms, ILS, marker beacon, Mode C transponder. No DME, no Stormscope, no ADF, and certainly no weather radar information in the cockpit. As it turned out, it did have one significant upgrade. A yoke-mounted, push-to-talk (PTT) switch. 

I had gotten my weather briefing and filed my IFR flight plan with Flight Service—all done in person at Charleston, as was my habit to stop for in-person briefings whenever possible on long cross-country flights.

It was solid “soft” IFR the whole way up the East Coast. Tops well above anything I could consider climbing above, with variable ceilings and visibilities. No mention of thunderstorms.

I launched with a friend who was a noninstrument-rated pilot and droned along in smooth air at 7,000 feet msl in solid IMC for the first half of the three-hour trip. Nothing more than occasional light rain showers and little talk on the frequency. 

Somewhere over North Carolina, I overheard the controller talking to one or two other aircraft about some small areas of scattered precipitation. No one sounded concerned. There had been no mention of the possibility of thunderstorms in the weather briefing I’d received from Flight Service.

It had been a dark and gloomy flight, despite it being midday. I had the cockpit and nav lights turned on. I started to notice it was getting darker, and then very much darker. Sensing I might be heading into heavy rain, I slowed to maneuvering airspeed, tightened my seat belt, and turned up the panel lights. I could see my wingtips out the side windows but that was about it. 

In an instant—and I mean an instant— I encountered extremely heavy rain and the worst turbulence of my short aviation career (or since). I looked at my copilot as a flash of lightning created a silhouette, which to this day I can still see in my memory. The thought that entered my mind in that same moment was, “My flight instructor is not with me.” 

Chester Sprague, an active-duty Air Force colonel, had been my instructor throughout my instrument and commercial training at the Aero Club’s Part 141 School. He was demanding to say the least and expected you to fly precisely at all times. “Get on your altitude! If you can hold it 50 feet off, you can hold it on altitude!” Whenever he got me task saturated, he would drill me with, “Fly the airplane, fly the airplane, fly the airplane.” 

Those words now echoed in my head.

It was raining so hard that it was as if fire hoses had been trained on the airplane. I couldn’t see anything beyond the plexiglass. My instrument scan told me I was in serious danger. The plane shook so violently that the instruments were blurry and hard to read.

Using the artificial horizon, as quickly as I corrected the 50-degree right bank to level, the plane was thrown into a 60-degree left bank. Similarly, the plane pitched up and down 20 to 30 degrees instantaneously. Maintaining an altitude was out of the question. The airspeed indicator flipped back and forth like a windshield wiper set on high speed.The directional gyro tumbled and the card spun. The whiskey compass was useless. The vertical speed indicator alternated between 2,000-feet-per-minute climbs and descents. The altimeter alternately wound up and then unwound. The turbulence was so great that all I focused on was the artificial horizon and keeping the aircraft right side up. 

I keyed the PTT on the yoke and said, “88V is in a cell.” The controller responded with, “Looks like you will be out of it in 2 miles.” To which I replied, “88V requests lower.” It seemed like a long time, but the controller came back quickly and told me to descend from 7,000 to 4,000. I was just about to declare an emergency and start down anyway.  

At the moment the controller cleared me for lower, the immature thunderstorm spit me out of the bottom of the cell at something greater than 2,000 fpm. In what seemed like a second, I had gone from extreme  turbulence, with zero visibility, to smooth air, 5 to 8 miles visibility with a definite ceiling a few hundred feet above me, and zero precipitation. It was as if the whole event never happened. It was as smooth and as calm as it had been 30 seconds earlier.  

Reflecting over the years on what had occurred, I’ve come to realize I owe my life to Sprague. Had he not been so thorough and demanding during my training, I would not have been able to “fly the airplane” when it really counted. The colonel is no longer with us, but I have to wonder how many other pilots he should be credited with saving. 

Today, we have radar in the cockpit from either ADS-B or a commercial service. So no one should ever stumble into a thunderstorm like I did. 

During my time in the cell, I saw only one flash of lightning. When it spit me out, there was no rain coming out of the clouds above me. That thunderstorm may have only been five or 10 minutes old in its development cycle, but that is easily within the latency of the satellite-delivered radar information. At most, with modern technology, that cell might have been the first red speck on an otherwise display of green and yellow. 

The old advice for dealing with thunderstorms in small GA aircraft still applies. See and avoid.

Fly under the ceiling and avoid the rain shafts. Fly around them when they are not embedded in other clouds. Fly over the top and around the buildups or stay on the ground and wait for a better day.

I keep in mind to pass behind any suspicious areas, so the storms will have moved farther away from me than their last displayed position. But if the storms are organized into anything resembling a line, or moving fast, I find a nice pilot’s lounge and wait them out!

This column first appeared in the November Issue 952 of the FLYING print edition.