Page 7 - Volume 17 Number 11

by Kevin WareWilmington, Delaware (KILM) at 0730 in the morning.Outbound,Trip HomeFreeport in the Citation last night, having taken the airline red eye down from Seattle. The maintenance guys back in Bellingham need the King Air to be in their hangar by tomorrow night, so we don’t have any time to waste in the warm sunny weather. We are both pretty bushed, but after discussing the 3,000 nm, 14-hour King Air trip home, we decide that if we watch each other closely, and alternate “pilot flying” legs, we should be OK.The weather, of course, is not OK. It is mid-March, and there is a low pressure system sitting right in the middle of the country raising general havoc, making the direct 2,450 nm route from the Bahamas to the Seattle area ill-advised in a King Air, which likes to fly in the mid 20s. One alternative would be to fly from Florida through Texas, around the south side of the system. This adds about 1,000 nm, but it isthe warmest, and, having done it many times before in the winter, it is route I am most comfortable with. The winds aloft, however, do not favor that route, with nearly 100 knots on the nose, making it almost impossible to get home in one day in a King Air.Fred (the company’s owner, a very experienced ATP himself, and my fellow outbound pilot), has been studying the weather carefully and over dinner favors a more unusual route, almost directly north until near the Canadian border, and then west from there, bypassing the low pressure system on its north side. This makes it a 4,600 nm trip, but the winds flowing counter-clockwise around the large mid-America low will actually help us a bit. I have flown with Fred on and off for over 10 years, and have learned that he is usually right about this sort of thing. We decide to head north toJim has the first leg and rotates the King Air off Freeport’s (MYGF) runway 06 on a bright sunny 80-degree morning, into a gentle breeze from the east. After climbing over a few scattered clouds at 3,000 feet, we turn left and head directly for the RAPPS intersection, about 30 nm to the north. From there, it is Bahamas Route 65V (BR65V) until we get cleared direct to KILM by U.S. controllers. The Customs office in KILM is both professional and friendly. We board some catered lunch, and top the tanks.From KILM it is my leg, almost straight north to the Great Lakes, then west to a planned fuel stop in Fargo, ND (KFAR), and from there all the way home. However, three hours into the trip the winds are not as forecast and our calculations show we will have only 20 minutes of fuel on landing in KFAR. Eau Claire, Wisconsin (KEAU) is about 250 nm closer to us, and some old E6B wheeling shows we can land there with about 1.2 hours of fuel remaining, a comfortable number for both Jim and I.NOVEMBER 2013 TWIN & TURBINE • 5