Note to self: Don’t fly through clouds when the temps are below freezing

by philg

My friend Julian and I decided to do a little instrument training flight yesterday in our Cirrus SR20.  The ceilings were perfect for practicing instrument approaches:  a layer of clouds from about 1000′ above the ground to 3000′ above sea level.  Wintertime instrument flying, however, requires being careful about icing.  It was below freezing on the ground.  The weather briefer told Julian that it was a beautiful day for practicing instrument approaches.  There were no airmets out for icing.  There were no pilot reports of icing.  There was supposedly an inversion with warmer air aloft.


After an hour on its electric block heater, we pulled the airplane out of the hangar and noticed some red brake fluid seeping out from an inspection panel on the inboard right wing.  Fortunately, I had some good karma built up with the mechanics at East Coast Aero Club and Rob Brigham zipped over to lie down on the ground, remove the panel, and tighten a hydraulic fitting.  Given the spate of Cirrus pilots who’ve managed to set their planes on fire with the brakes, and the fact that we’d never seen a leaking airplane braking system, we were a bit concerned about this.  But we pushed on the brakes and Rob didn’t see any more fluid coming out.


We took off and did an uneventful ILS 11 approach into Worcester, going missed at 200′ above the ground and climbing back up into the clouds for Lawrence.  We were directed to climb up to 5000′.  With the extra delay of getting the brakes tightened, it was beginning to get darker and colder.  We stepped down from 5000′ to 2000′ for the approach into Lawrence.  Julian was doing a bad job of holding altitude.  The plane should hold 105 knots and altitude with about 50 percent power.  He kept cranking up the power to almost 75 percent.  The plane began to vibrate a bit.  I had spent the first part of the flight checking the wings for ice every few minutes, but had become complacent.  We looked at the wings:  about 3/8″ of ice.  Then the windshield began to ice up.  “Your airplane,” said Julian, who had been flying up until now.  I was in the right (copilot’s) seat, looking sideways at the instruments on the left side.  I asked Julian to engage the alternate air intake so that the engine wasn’t trying to suck air through a potentially iced-over filtered inlet.  Our pitot heat was already on, which prevents the airspeed indicator and altimeter from becoming useless and freaking out pilots.


We reported the ice to the Lawrence Tower, but there was really nothing to do differently because we’d already been cleared for the approach and were planning to descend as soon as we intercepted the glide slope.  One thing that I remembered about icing is not to use the flaps, which increase the risk of a tailplane stall and a steep pitch down of the nose.  We didn’t know what our stall speed would be with the new wing shape, so we kept our speed up at 100 knots until just short of the runway, then slowed down to 85 knots for a no-flap not-particularly-great landing.  Two things were in our favor during this landing:  (1) the ceilings remained high (1000′), so we didn’t build up a lot of ice in the final minute or two and we didn’t have to fly the approach down to minimums (200′ above the ground), and (2) the runway at Lawrence is 5000′ long, so you can have lots of extra airspeed and still stop well before reaching the end.


It was getting on toward 5:00 pm in Lawrence, but the guys at Eagle East Aviation were there.  They had done some maintenance work on my old Diamond Star, and I would always stop in whenever I was in Lawrence.  Tim Campbell, one of the owners, cleared some planes out of his maintenance hangar and helped us pull the Cirrus in over the icy ramp.  Then he cranked up one of the big overhead heaters and we went into the office to hang out and wait for the ice to melt off the wing leading edges and prop.  My primary instructor, Hal Spector, happened to be there.  When you do something unnecessary and stupid, why is it that your teacher must always be present?


After 30 minutes, we had the ice off, the ceilings were still more than 1000′, the visibility was more than 10 miles, and there was no precipitation.  Despite the darkness, we decided to go VFR under the clouds rather than IFR through the clouds back to Bedford (a 10-minute flight).  Lawrence was calling itself IFR, so we needed a “special VFR” clearance to get out (at night, this is available only to instrument-rated pilots with instrument-equipped planes).  I don’t like to scud-run at night, but we wanted to get home (a dangerous tendency in itself) and we knew that we didn’t like the clouds.  Visibility underneath the cloud layer was good and the trip back to Bedford was uneventful.  We put the plane away, checked for more brake fluid leaking (none found), and stopped at Jet Aviation to have some chocolate with the gals working the desk.


My previous encounters with ice were all in situations where it was warm at lower altitudes and those were altitudes where it was legal and safe to fly instruments, i.e., I could have at any time descended and melted the ice off the plane.  In this case, we were at all times close to airports with instrument approaches, but the surface temperature was below freezing and we would be forced to fly the plane all the way to the ground with whatever ice it had picked up.


So… what did we learn?  Don’t fly a feeble non-deiced airplane through a cloud in the winter, even if the briefers say that no ice or precip is forecast, unless there are a few thousand feet of warm air over the ground.

34 thoughts on “Note to self: Don’t fly through clouds when the temps are below freezing”

  1. Scary stuff. I’m glad you made it back safely.

    Some hobbies aren’t too forgiving and I think you’ve found one of them. Be careful. We would all hate to loose one of the good ones.

    – Al

  2. Have you read “Weather Flying” by Buck? It’s a great reference for this kind of stuff. 1) You were to the northeast of an area of low pressure…a good bet for ice. 2) The briefers may mention an inversion aloft, but be sure to find out where they think it is and what they think the temps are…just one guy’s thoughts. – – PS how did the cirrus’s defroster do?

  3. “Ice is where you find it.” It would have to be a very warm winter day in the NE for the freezing level to be high enough to have “a few thousand feed of warm air” between your plane and the ground. In my opinion, flying a single-engine airplane in IFR conditions when the ceiling is less than 1500 feet is just too dangerous. Forget about ice, what could a pilot do if the engine stops and the ceiling is 400 feet? Glad you did not have any problem.

  4. The Cirrus’s windshield defroster didn’t seem to be effective. The Cirrus wings definitely seem to be more critical than the old DA40’s in ice. Performance is seriously degraded with any ice at all. I have read Weather Flying, but it was a few years ago and I didn’t understand it fully. I would like to know as much about weather as a TV meteorologist.

    Patxaran: I don’t like flying around in generally low IMC either. I try to set up all of my flights so that I always have at least 500′ of ceiling at my destination airport and 1000′ at alternates. This flight caught me by surprise. I think this fits into the “most people die by falling in their own bathrooms” theory. We were never more than 15 minutes from our home airport, enveloped in Boston Approach’s RADAR the whole time, so it didn’t seem possible to get into serious trouble.

  5. Patxaran – The beauty of the cirrus is that he could pull the ‘chute if he’s in IMC with 0/0 beneath him and the engine packs it in. The NTSB records do not support the idea that one is safer in “IMC over poor glide-in conditions” in a twin. Assuming one is willing to put faith in statistics, of course.

  6. Congratulations on your safe return. I would be preaching to the choir if I told you pilots who survive 3/8″ of ice are more likely to push it next time to 1″ and even to 2″ before their fatal crash. My brother-in-law, an FAA manager, was required to listen to a recording of a pilot screaming over the radio that he had lost control of his aircraft to ice and plunged to his death. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.

  7. Signifant ice is a case where the parachute would seem to be a real option.

    Is there any possiblity that ice might form over the parachute over and interfer with its deployment?

  8. Jim: There is a case of a guy in the Sierra who picked up ice in his SR22 (equipped with the Cirrus TKS ice protection system). He deployed the ‘chute and it ripped out of the plane. Cirrus attributes the failure of the parachute to his deploying at too high an airspeed, but as the crash was fatal we will never know.

    Don: Maybe in a plane that had handled the 3/8″ of ice more gracefully, I would have become emboldened. But the Cirrus scared me. I would not have wanted to attempt a missed approach, much less go out in heavier ice.

  9. Philip: “I would like to know as much about weather as a TV meteorologist.”

    A non-flying friend of mine recommends the USDA’s “Graduate School” distance learning courses in meteorology. He spent his teens as a “storm chaser” (amateur tornado reporter) in Oklahoma and is purusing a PhD in geology, but still found the materials informative and helpful for his research.

    http://www.grad.usda.gov/ , click on “Distance Education.”

  10. Phillip, I really like this posting. It is very important that pilot discuss problems/challenges they encounter. Any pilot who has not seen the “wolf ears” (Spanish expression) hasn’t flown much. Flying is dangerous. Fishing magazines do not have too many articles about the risks of fishing, flying magazines do. We all like to read Peter Garrison’s column “Aftermath” but we do not like to discuss how close we got to be the subject of one of them.

    32 Papa, I think you will agree with me in that it is better not to have to deploy the chute, I do agree with you in what concerns twins, in the hands of the average pilot (most of us) they are more dangerous than singles.

  12. You’ve discovered one of the truths of aviation that I learned early on: your instructor is always there to see your screw-ups.

    Thanks for the write-up. It’s always good to hear about flying mistakes. It may just make the rest of us a bit more aware of our own weaknesses.

  13. I do know that the current “General Aviation” commercials on the Weather Channel are only appealing to existing pilots. My wife saw one the other day and asked me point blank “Aren’t there any marketing people that are pilots? That thing sucked.” Clearly we need to improve our messaging and safety is not the issue that we need to focus the marketing on. We should probably start with a Why Fly? type of message.

  14. It’s interesting to read this post the day after attending a “Wings” seminar on decision making. I’m especially curious about the desire for the return flight from Lawrence back to Bedford (which you say is a 10 minute flight). Did you consider just driving home?

  15. How about taking a few lessons with Field Morey of http://www.ifrwest.com. I can’t imagine there are many people who know more about icing in SEP from a practical point of view: 30,000+ hours, most of which are teaching the IR, lots of purposeful trips from one side of the US to the other and back to a schedule, nearly all in C182 with nothing more than a hot prop.

  16. I no longer find FAA seminars useful. I think what pilots really need are meetings that mimic those of “Alcoholic Anonymous.” “My name is John and last week I did something really stupid.” At the FAA seminars the very presence of the FAA officials inhibits all the participants from having open and sincere discussions. The NTSB reports are full of accidents caused by pilots who one can assume to be intelligent and experienced. So, why the last sentence of the report reads “failure of the pilot…” Phillip did not do anything “wrong.” He got a weather briefing, he filed an IFR flight plan, and he always had an out… But, the question is: would he do it again? That is why all pilots benefit from his experience: “if it happened to Phillip rest assured it can happen to you.” I have always had lots of respect for ice and low IFR conditions, some of it acquired at a high cost; some of it I got for free.

  17. patxaran: Perhaps your FSDO isn’t quite like mine (San Jose), but I really enjoy the seminars, and have generally found them to be a supportive “AA” type environment.

  18. David: We did consider having Julian’s wife pick us up at LWM and would have called her if the visibility had been less than 6 miles. As for taking lessons with Field Morey… I got a lot of my training from a buy who was a CFI and then a night cargo pilot (Cessna Caravan) in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He did flights through ice almost daily in the Caravan and occasionally in GA planes (“one time I got so much ice on a C172 that I was descending at 500 fpm with full power”). A lot of my other instructors have been 10,000+ hour guys. All of the instruction in the world can’t change the fact that for transportation you need de-icing equipment and an engine that can drag you up above the weather (turbocharged or turbine).

  19. David: My FSDO is great and FAA seminars are fine; I just don’t think they offer anything that one cannot get elsewhere. At the ones I have attended, an industry expert or a highly experienced pilot presented a subject providing some practical information. Fine, I just don’t really need to know how many types of ice a pilot can encounter. Much for the same reason I don’t need to know about the different types of bacteria living in three-day-old leftovers. Seen ice forming on the surfaces of Cessna 172 once is a life-time cure. All you need to know is this: never, never fly when there is visible moisture and temperatures are below freezing. I’m an avid reader of the NTSB and ASRS reports. They are a great source of aviation safety information.

    Phillip: An airplane that can go fast, deal with ice, and take you above the weather costs millions. In my opinion, pseudo-high performance airplanes (piston) are the most dangerous type of general aviation airplane. If you want to fly to have some fun, fly a Cessna 182, 172, or a Piper Cub; if you need to fly when the weather is nasty you’ll need at least a turboprop. Piper makes about 16 Malibus each year. Each year for the past four years there have been about two fatal accidents involving Piper Malibus. What is the reason for that?

  20. Patxaran: There are about 1000 PA46 (Malibu, Mirage, and Meridian) airframes that have been built over 20 years. And they do seem to be involved in a fair number of fatal crashes. A friend with an old Cessna discouraged me from buying one with the words “A part-time pilot should not fly a full-time airplane.” The main problem seems to be that the PA46’s capability tempts people into using it like an airliner. Folks fly in some pretty terrible weather and usually get through. But then they eventually get into a thunderstorm and lose control and the airframe comes apart. I think the accident rate must have come down because the insurance isn’t all that expensive anymore. The better pilots pay around $10,000 per year on an airplane that is worth $500,000.

    I’ve taken risks in a Malibu that I would never have taken in a less capable airplane. We took off from Boston during one of the heaviest snowstorms that I can remember. The ceiling was 700′ overcast and we didn’t get out of the clouds until 20,000′. We listened to Southwest Airlines 737s talking about what they were going to do because Providence had gone below minimums. I thought to myself “this would be a bad time for this notoriously unreliable overstressed single piston engine to quit.” But it didn’t and we made it to Sarasota, Florida non-stop six hours later. Flying from Sarasota to South Dakota a week later (the owner and pilot-in-command was doing some medical work there), the autopilot flaked out on us and we had to hand-fly in the clouds for 2.3 hours at FL240 before breaking out. I did most of the instrument flying from the right seat because I needed the practice. When we got to Kansas, the landing gear wouldn’t come down for awhile because it was frozen. So… you don’t have to convince me that a $300,000-500,000 Malibu isn’t as reliable as a $3 million jet, but it is still a remarkable airplane that can be operated safely by cautious pilots.

  21. Philip: Piper Malibus are safe airplanes when they are flown within the safety envelope of a Cessna 182. They go faster. That is their only advantage. They do have a performance envelope much larger than the one of a Cessna 182. Fly a Piper Malibu like a Pilatus P-12 and, in my opinion, you are asking for trouble. I’m not a great pilot or a safety expert. I’m just a private pilot, instrument rated, who flies about 80h/year. But since I got my pilot license almost three decades ago in Spain (I was 20 at the time) I have seen lots of very smart good pilots buy the farm. As “Dirty Harry” said: “A man is got to know his limitations.” And I would add the limitations of the airplane he is flying. “I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment, and kept me flying respectful of my machine and always alert in the cockpit.” Chuck Yeager.

  22. I think there’s a intermediate position here. Certainly any piston FIKI (for the non-pilots – flight into known icing certified) plane in severe ice is an accident waiting to happen. Those that have FIKI Mooneys and malibus, even light twins should know this. I’ve been scared in an aztec…I can’t imagine a single. However, having a FIKI would allow flying IFR in the winter with a wider margin of safety than Philip has with the cirrus. The reason I stress FIKI airplanes such as the Mooney, T210’s etc. over “ice protection systems” such as the cirrus and columbia is 1) generally better flight test on the FIKI airplanes for certification and 2) The windshield issue. Philip points out that the window defrost was ineffective in the cirrus, and I’ve heard that is also the case with the columbia. Capt.’s Buck and Gann may have been able to open the side window and look out of their DC2’s but I doubt you can look out the window of your columbia and see anything meaningful. Or you could take my current approach (in a ’46 65hp Champ) and stay beneath the clouds or land on a lake (skis) and wait it out…

  23. High-performance piston planes remind me of the supped-up “SEAT 600s” of the 60s in Spain (the “600” stands for the cc displacement of the engine, the same as a small motorcycle). Driven by Formula-one wannabes, whey did go from 0 to 100km in the same or less time than a Porsche. They just did not have the same brakes or safety cage. Fine, as long as nothing goes wrong. Please, do not interpret this as an attack on those flying high-performance piston planes.

  24. I’m with 32 Papa. The FIKI equipment is nice to have, but you don’t end up using it much because of the turbocharger. My friend who owns the Malibu flies in conditions that, frankly, scare me. But he ends up pushing the boots button about twice a year. He doesn’t spend more than a few minutes on any given flight at an altitude where ice is a possibility. He doesn’t spend that much time inside the clouds, either. The turbochargers pull him up to 25,000′. If you look at area forecasts, almost always they talk about clouds only up to FL200. Sometimes they are forecast to FL250, but those clouds are way too cold to contain ice and in practice I think he is nearly always in clear sunny air at FL240 (westbound) or FL250 (eastbound). I don’t think it is right to say that a Malibu is not potentially safer for transportation than a 182 (though statistically the 182 seems to win). The Malibu can take you over the weather and the 182 forces you to drive through clouds hour after hour (or wait a few days). The fact that pilots get overambitious with the weather because the Malibu is so capable isn’t the plane’s fault.

  25. Philip: I completely agree with you. But the question is, besides a better view on top what does the Malibu offer that the 182 lacks from the point of view of safety? If the weather is too dangerous for a Cessna 182 it is too dangerous for a Malibu. It is probably feasible to cross the Atlantic in a Mooney, but I wonder what would be the cost of insuring such trip. I think we have seen the complete demise of the twin-engine piston airplane. They seem to be good only to train pilots to fly turbine-powered twin-engine craft. In my opinion, the “additional safety” promise of the twins turned out to be a false one. Perhaps the new jets will really make it possible to have reliable transportation airplanes for less than $2M…

  26. Patxaran: I can give you a concrete example. The weather in DC was very good. The weather in Boston area had a layer of clouds, potentially icing (Airmet), from about 1500′ AGL to 7000′ AGL. A Malibu could do this flight in perfect safety and legality. You climb out of DC to 15,500′, say, catching a huge tailwind. You are in clear air all the time until you do an ILS approach at the very end. During that ILS you’d be in the clouds for about 4 minutes. You’d break out at 1500′ AGL on an approach with a minimum of 200′ or 300′. That is not “dangerous” weather for a Malibu in my opinion, but it would be an illegal flight in any airplane not certified for FIKI and maybe not a very safe one either if those subfreezing clouds turned out to yield heavy ice. You wouldn’t even be tired doing that ILS in the Malibu because the flight time would be so much shorter than in the 182 and your body would be pretty near sea level pressure. In the 182 you might be tempted to scud-run (the TAFs called for the ceilings to lift to 3000′, but they never did) or shoot that approach and pray for a lack of icing (you might not be making as good decisions because you’d have been in the air for an extra hour or two and your body would have been breathing very thin air).

  27. Philip: What can I say? Piper should hire you to write their commercials. Your example is excellent, and you are right: there are things you can do with a Malibu that you cannot do with a Cessna. I’m going to add something: it is probably true that a Malibu offers the best utility/cost ratio (if transportation is your goal). I have seen what look like perfectly good copies on ASO.COM for about $500K. The point I tried to make is that Malibus (or similar airplanes) are not qualitatively better than a Cessna 182; they just have a little quantitative advantage. Again, I stand corrected: I should have said that if the weather is too bad for a Cessna, 90% of the time it is going to be too bad for a Malibu. My feeling is that most pilots will agree with your position (as I understand it). Also, the industry seems to be going the way of the high-speed single engine piston. (If the manufacturers are going to pay millions in a lawsuit after an accident, they probably prefer if the pilots died in an expensive airplane). I however, think that the marginally better performance you’ll get from an airplane like the Malibu does not justify the sacrifice in that other safety and utility offered by simpler airplanes (lower stall speed, lower cost…). “Para gustos se hicieron los colores.” I shall remain a firm believer in the greatness of simpler, cheaper, and statistically safer airplanes like the Cessna 182, which is, I believe, the best light airplane ever made.

  28. Patxaran: It wasn’t a contrived example, either! Most of the time in the last year when I’ve had to cancel a flight in a simple four-seater, I’ve asked myself “Would I have been willing to do this in a Malibu?” About 70 percent of the time the answer is “yes.” For the remaining 30 percent, about half of them I would have been willing to do in a bizjet with a professional co-pilot. The final 15 percent, I would have deferred in any aircraft under all circumstances (e.g., trying to depart a VFR-only airport in the mountains in Alaska where there were low clouds and rain).

  29. Philip – When you buy your D-jet can I have the cirrus? If diamond actually manages to build it, and you believe their marketing hype (which seems aimed at me specifically), then it will be an airplane that costs less than a new malibu, goes a bit faster, has a safer engine and is probably the coolest looking plane I’ve seen. And it has a dog friendly bench seat. It would seem to offer you the all-weather range to go where you go. Order it and I’ll sign up for a BFR/checkout…oh well enough dreaming, I’ll have to remain satisfied with my 95mph, 60 year-old bug smasher.

  30. Philip: What would the equivalent percentage be in a new FIKI-certified, Stormscope-equipped Mooney? How does the answer change if it is an Ovation 2 (non-turbo) vs a Bravo (turbo)?

  31. I think the Mooney Bravo will do every mission that a Malibu can do. For me, however, the lack of pressurization is a problem because I like to fly with the dog (not sure if I could rig up a workable oxygen system for him) and I want a quiet interior. I think the Ovation with FIKI would probably let me do 40-50 percent of the flights that I have scrapped in my Cirrus and Diamond. Someone who was willing to rely on the anti-ice system for more than a few minutes on the way up or down could probably build right back up near the 70 percent of the Malibu. For someone without a dog and who is not a wuss about noise, the Mooney is definitely the best value for transportation (something most Cirrus buyers probably figure out too late!).

  32. Today’s avweb.com (1-16-06) contains an article about a cirrus falling out of the sky (on it’s chute) after becoming uncontrollable after an icing encounter. It seems that philip is not the only one to suggest that cirri don’t handle ice well…

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