January 2005
For as long as I can recall, I’ve been quite fond of using the adage that “it is much better to be down here wishing you were up there than up there wishing you were down here.”
The first time I used that phrase under combat conditions was from an airline cockpit many years ago. I had pulled our jet into the runup block adjacent to the departure runway at Pittsburgh while I studied the weather radar in the instrument panel in front of me.
A very nasty looking piece of weather lay alarmingly near the departure end of the runway. It was a pretty hefty thunderstorm—a short line, really—and it was only a few miles to the west of the airport boundary, extending directly across our planned departure path.
After half a minute of peering intently at the radar echo, I said to the copilot, “I don’t like this.” He nodded in agreement. I told him to tell the tower that we would not be departing until the heavy weather had blown measurably to the east. I then reached for the cabin public address microphone and announced basically the same thing to the full house of passengers sitting in the customer end of our Boeing jet.
“This is the captain, and I’m afraid that we’re going to need to take a few minutes of delay here on the ground because of the weather. Frankly, I just don’t like the way it looks right now, so I’ve elected to wait it out.” I ended my explanation with that adage about “it is much better to be down here…”.
I had hardly hung up the PA microphone when the front edge of the storm cell to the west marched up to our current parked location and began to display its wares. For the next few minutes, rain fell heavily, lightning flashed, thunder boomed and gusts of wind rocked our jetliner against the restraining limits of its hydraulic parking brake.
I sipped coffee while we sat on the blacktop and waited out Mother Nature. After a few minutes inside the cauldron, the back edge of the thunderstorm arrived just as quickly as the front edge had, and we were suddenly back in blue skies with the afternoon sun laying directly ahead.
I picked up the cockpit PA again. “Okay, folks, we’re now ready to go. It’s time that we began to wish that we were up there.”
As I released the parking brake and began to edge the Boeing toward the runway, I could hear the stomping, clapping and cheering from the cabin—that downpour we had sat through on solid ground had made the passengers instant believers, too, in my adage about it being far better that we were wishing to be up there rather than vice-versa at that particular juncture of time and space.
Sometimes, though, the adage needs to be altered to cover the need to be over here or over there, rather than just up or down. Once you are off the ground, a prudent pilot needs to keep in mind the theory of the shrinking sky and how best to deal with it.
The basic premise here is that airspace that is currently being covered by horrendous weather is airspace that simply does not exist from that pilot’s point of view. It is not even available for consideration, so don’t even think about whether or not to use it.
Once you’ve made up your mind that the blotch of heavy rain/lightning/wind laying ahead of you is not where you’d like to be, that means that a chunk of today’s sky simply doesn’t exist for you—you must go elsewhere.
In jetliners we could sometimes go up, but that was only rarely and often didn’t work anyway. I recall a trip in an early generation jet when I thought we could easily top the building line of CU that lay between us and our destination. I got a clearance to climb, pushed up the throttles, and watched with increasing concern as our jet began to lose the race between our vertical speed and the rate of climb of the top edge of that stark white billowing, building CU.
I was on the edge of my seat and considering a hasty one-eighty when a small saddle between two columns of cloud towers that were moving upward like an express elevator showed itself 30 degrees to the left.
I made a zig, stayed in the clear, and managed to barely outrace the upward boiling clouds—a bit of good fortune, because it would have unquestionably been rougher than hell in there, even if we had just poked our snout into the churning cloud mass just a little bit.
Rough weather is rough on all airplanes, but rougher on smaller airplanes simply because they are more the ping-pong ball in a hurricane than a larger mass of metal weighing in at several hundred thousand pounds.
Again, the idea is that when the weather gets particularly heavy that means that those portions of the sky just simply do not exist for that pilot today—so don’t even think about it just go elsewhere. It’s sort of Mother Nature’s way of announcing a sudden TFR where all flight is, from the pilot’s point of view, strictly verboten.
So if you can’t stay on the ground and you can’t get above (or below, which can work with lesser weather conditions, but is always a problematic solution), where can you go? Left or right. Deviating around a mass of horrible conditions can be an effective technique when conditions are right, and a very ineffective and inefficient technique when they are not.
Airmass thunderstorms and even short lines of foul weather can be sidestepped quite nicely by nearly any airplane—and, in some ways, the piston engine general aviation fleet can sometimes have an advantage over its jetliner brethren. If you play with a jet down low for very long, the fuel consumption per hour and per mile can sometimes get to some pretty alarming numbers.
Likewise simply slowing down and waiting while some piece of foul weather begins to wander out of your way—a technique that’s far more efficient in something like a light twin compared to a big Boeing.
Low altitude fuel consumption in a jet can quickly shoot some giant holes in what the pilot expected to have in the way of flight endurance, so most jet folks will opt to stay high and make big geographic deviations than taking a chance on a smaller deviation down lower.
From my own airline flying history, I remember going enormously out of the way up in the Flight Levels while deviating around long lines of nasty weather. One trip from Pittsburgh to New York took me just south of Montreal to get around the northern edge of what I deemed at the time as the Mother of All Frontal Zones.
Making route deviations is where having jet speed can be a real advantage. Let’s say that today’s big area of bad weather would require a 300-mile total deviation in order to completely escape the impacted area (and, for the moment, putting aside the very real considerations of air traffic control, TFRs and military airspace restrictions on the pilot’s ability to turn here or there as needed).
In a 450-knot jet, the total air time increase is 40 minutes—not terrible if it were a two-hour flight to begin with. The same deviation in a 180-knot light twin would take 1 hour and 40 minutes of additional flight time—a darn big penalty.
One trip I was faced with from Texas to Florida had me trying to depart on a day when a really horrible line along a cold front stretched from New Orleans to Tennessee, with an occluded front complicating matters on an east-west line from Arkansas to Georgia.
Rather than a 900-mile straight-line trip, I could see from the map that I’d need to go 200 miles north, then 600 east, then 450 south to clear the pack of horrible stuff—a total of 1,250 miles.
If I were in a jet—particularly in an airliner, where I wasn’t paying for the fuel myself—I would consider adding that amount of flight time to keep the ride safe and sane. But in most General Aviation airplanes, the added distance, the additional fuel stop, the overall flight time and the costs involved would make the decision real easy. That experience showed me once again that there was yet another alternative way of getting around an extensive area of really bad weather.
Remember the adage that it is far better to be down here wishing you were up there, than up there wishing you were down here? Well, I remembered it quite well that particular day, canceled the flight, spent an extra day in Texas and came home the morning after in crystal clear, calm and blue skies.
Funny thing was, my bride and I went to a movie, then a nice dinner—and not once, for an instant, did I find myself “wishing I was up there”—at least not on that particular night. Up there versus down here: it’s an adage worth remembering.
Editor-at-large Thomas Block has flown nearly 30,000 hours since his first hour of dual in 1959. In addition to his 36 year career as a US Airway pilot, he has been an aviation magazine writer since 1969, a best-selling novelist, and the owner of more than a dozen personal airplanes.
