Updates and Revelations

So my last post left me waiting for maintenance. I ended up staying the night there, and then headed further south to North Bay to pick up the Chief Pilot's daughter. The radio problem was only a minor issue so they were able to fix it.

I was airborne by 0703 Tuesday morning, and had an uneventful flight into North Bay. I met the Chief's daughter and she had a couple carloads of her stuff and a few of her friends there to see her off for the summer. As I was busy loading the plane, I heard from someone behind me, "Chad.", I turned around, and low and behold one of her friends/classmates was a guy I knew from way back in Sarnia. I was so stunned the first things that came out of my mouth were, "What the heck?!". lol. I shook his hand and we gave each other a more proper greeting. Once again I'm reminded of how small this world is, and how even smaller the world of aviation is.

In contrast to how small the world of aviation is, whenever I look down at the ground below me when I'm flying, it strikes me as to how geographically big the world of aviation is. To the nearest place I fly its only a 35 minute flight, but its mind boggling to think of how much distance that would be to hike, especially in the swampy terrain. It makes me wonder how much of this land I'm flying over is land that has never been touched by a human foot, and probably never will.

Once we finally made it back to base, the Chief was already waiting for me with a load ready to go, and they kept coming until 8 PM. No rest for the wicked, but I don't mind, its money in my pocket.

Wednesday was another full day of flying, but it got really windy in the afternoon, so we called it a day early, and Thursday was no good for flying at all. Friday was a good solid day of flying.

Its Saturday today, and I've had one flight this morning, but the weather is once again iffy, so we're giving it a couple hours, and we're not that busy anyways. That one flight this morning was cool however, because it gave me a very cool chance to witness some weather theory in real life, that I've never seen before. Weather is so much easier to practically apply to flying when you see it happen for real, so today I learned an awesome lesson. When the temperature is in the vicinity of freezing, and there's a warm front passing through, you can get some very interesting weather phenomina. Its difficult to explain without diagrams, so here is a crude one I drew up in 5 minutes in paint:

Warm fronts with temperatures near the freezing point are recipes for freezing rain. We had just such an occurrance on my flight up the coast. There was a warm front forecast to be in between my departure point and destination.

Note the little dashed line representing our freezing level, which is the altitude at which below that it is above 0 deg C, and above that it is below 0 deg Celcius. Remember in general the higher the altitude the colder it gets. Note how in front of the Warm front (to the right) the freezing level is closer to the surface. This is because a Warm front brings warmer air, so once the warm front has passed, the freezing level will be higher up. Even Private Pilot's learn this theory, and I have even spent a fair amount of time teaching it to students, but up until this point I've never actually witnessed it while flying, so it was quite fascinating.

At home base the temperature was around 10 degrees on the surface, but on the way I passed through the warm front into the cold side of it (from left to right on the diagram), and within a matter of minutes the temperature dropped quite sharply. While I was flying, I started passing through some rain, and since I knew freezing rain was forecast as being possible, I glanced at the thermometer and noted it at 10 degrees. Ok so I'm good, it can't freeze in 10 degree weather. When I landed however, I noticed the temperature had dropped quite sharply, down to 1 degree. Wow, that's quite the change. I arrived early due to a wicked tailwind, and it was raining moderately, so I hopped out to check that the rain wasn't freezing to the airplane. It wasn't so I got lucky. Once my passengers arrived and we got everything loaded I checked once more to make sure that the water on my plane was still liquid and not freezing. I noticed on the tail there was once spot where there was just a very thin layer of ice in a small area. It melted and broke off as soon as I touched it. I figured we'd be ok as long as it stayed liquid until we took off, cause it would be getting warmer now since we would be flying back into the warm front.

I got lucky, if it had been 2 degrees colder, we would have had freezing rain. Freezing rain occurs in the spot on the diagram where it shows its raining. Precipiation which forms above the freezing level forms as snow, but as it falls, if it falls through the wedge shaped area that is below the freezing level then it melts into rain. If that rain once again falls through the boundary of the warm front (red line), it falls back into an area that is above the freezing level. In that spot, it becomes freezing rain since the air in that area is below 0 degrees. If the air is cold enough to bring the freezing level right down to the surface, then you'll have freezing rain on the surface. In my case today it was just warm enough to keep the freezing level off the surface, and by the time I had climbed to an altitude where it would have been below zero, I had crossed into the warm side of the Warm front, and the air temp rose back up to around 10 degrees. That has always been one of the most fascinating things for me about weather theory, so it was cool to witness it in real life. Its one thing to understand the theory, but seeing it happen helps me bring all the theory into real life application, and that makes it much more useful.