Page 26 - Feb17TNT

Jet Journal
A Hole in the Ice
When clouds bring loads of ice, pilots must reach for all the tools in their toolbox.
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by Kevin Ware
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The nice thing about Learjets is that you can almost always vault completely over weather that would cause other aircraft no end of trouble. And so, it is with some concern that we are sitting in the pilot’s lounge at the FBO in Columbus, Georgia (KCSG) planning our 1,933-nm
return flight to Washington state, and studying some nasty weather that it looks like we will have to land in, rather than simply just jumping over.
It is 52 degrees and sunny in KCSG and clear and 31 back in Seattle. But in between, the entire central part of the United States is suffering from a blizzard due to a series of lows that extend all the way from Houston to Fargo, North Dakota. These are slowly moving east and carrying with them a huge load of water they picked up while over the Pacific Ocean a thousand miles out to the west. As they move east into colder air, all that water gets dumped, creating a mess of low ceilings with cloud tops well into the flight levels, plus blowing snow, ice, freezing mist and drizzle near the surface. The system is so large that in looking at the weather chart, we cannot see any way to readily fly around it, no matter how big of a dog leg we are willing to make.
To complicate matters, the winds aloft are howling from the northwest at more than 100 knots, which will give our 465-knot Lear 40 an effective ground speed of about 350, thus reducing our range to a bit under 1,000 nm. This severely limited our ability to “vault” over anything. This also means we will need to land somewhere in the middle of the weather mess for fuel. The immediate conundrum is where to make that stop.
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