Julian and I arrived back in Boston this evening in our new Cirrus SR20, N707WT. The trip back was a good illustration of the pluses and minuses of small airplane travel. Although I was fairly tired after 10 hours of flight training all day Friday and Saturday morning we departed Duluth Saturday afternoon in order to stay ahead of a line of thunderstorms. After gazing down at the interesting colors in Lake Superior and the top portion of Lake Michigan we stopped in Pellston, Michigan near where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet and then departed for an instrument flight rules (IFR) flight around the top of Lake Huron and over Toronto into Buffalo, New York. The lake and the city lights were quite beautiful from 7000′ above sea level. We did an uneventful instrument landing system (ILS) approach through some rain into Buffalo. It was dark by then so it was nice to have the centerline and touchdown-zone lighting. The FBO at Buffalo found us a $52/night hotel and we collapsed until 9:00 am this morning.
From Buffalo to Boston is only about 2.5 hours but one must cross the Berkshires (3000′ high) and the forecast was for moderately low clouds, ice in those clouds, rain, and a really low freezing level due to the cold temps on the surface (only about 48 degrees in Albany today). It wasn’t safe to go under the clouds given the numerous obstructions from towers, hills, and mountains. The Cirrus doesn’t have a turbocharger so it wouldn’t have been able to climb over the top of the clouds, forecast to 20,000′. We waited on the ground in Buffalo until 3:00 pm for some of the rain to dissipate on the RADAR and for some of the temperatures aloft to warm up. We decided to fly to Albany at 7000′ and if we picked up any ice we’d go to the minimum enroute altitude (5000′) and see if that was above freezing. If it wasn’t we’d continue to descend and land in Albany where we knew that the temperature would be above freezing. We would not continue across the Berkshires where it would be impossible to descend as far or as quickly due to the mountains.
We entered the clouds about 2500′ above the runway at Buffalo and broke out about 6000′ above sea level. This was a great illustration of the advantages of an instrument rating. Instead of bumping around near the ground we were above the clouds in smooth air. Gradually, however, we approach a wall of higher clouds. This was the rain system we’d seen on the RADAR and that we could also see in our airplane, which has a receiver to get weather information from the XM radio satellites (this instrument runs from the Avidyne multi-function display, which had failed during a training flight and restarted automatically but then crashed and got stuck on our trip into Buffalo, so we didn’t have much confidence in this). At 7000′ the main outside air temperature (OAT) gauge showed +4 degrees C. This is the one associated with the engine-monitoring system and in most Cirrus airplanes is the only one enabled. We had met a mechanic on Saturday, however, who knew how to reenable the OAT gauge on the primary flight display (PFD), which has its probe farther out on the wing. This read -2 degrees C. We asked Air Traffic Control to ask some of the airliners for temperature reports at 7000′ and we learned that it was probably much closer to -2 than to +4.
Heading towards Albany we picked up a little frost on part of the wing as the temperature dropped to -4 degrees C (or +2 if we believed the standard instrument). We asked for 5000′ and the temperature rose and the frost came off. We asked for a routing closer to Hartford, Connecticut to stay over lower terrain and into warmer air. ATC gave us the new routing over Westover Air Force Base in Western, MA. The rest of the flight was uneventful though almost solidly in the clouds the whole time. My landing wasn’t quite as smooth as the ones that I had done in training though by no means was it hard. The primary flight display (PFD) did not like the little bump, however, and drew red X’s across its electronic attitude indicator and gyro compass, telling us not to trust them and to refer to the backup “steam gauges”.
Our total flight time from Duluth to Boston was about 7 hours despite slight headwinds almost the entire way (this is unusual when going west to east; it is supposed to be a tailwind). The Cirrus is a fast little plane that is economical to operate and reasonably priced. But we couldn’t fly on our schedule and we never knew whether we were going to make it through Albany or not. The minimum airplane that is practical for transportation as opposed to recreation is something like a Piper Malibu with a turbocharger to climb above the clouds and de-icing equipment sufficient to earn FAA certification for “flight into known icing”. The Malibu would have climbed over the top of all that weather and then come down into Boston. We never would have had to turn on the de-icing gear.
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