Page 30 - June 2015 Volume 19 Number 6

It’s a cold, clear mid-winter morning as we descend out of FL430 in the Lear 40, crossing the Mississippi River in the vicinity of Dubuque, Iowa, on our way down to Hamilton/Butler County Regional (HAO), just north of Cincinnati, Ohio. Earlier that morning, we had filed from Tacoma, Washington (TIW) direct to HAO, a plan that seemed the easiest at the time, but it was about to become, quite obviously, not the best idea. Because onboard GPS navigation and ATC computer systems make ‘direct to the airport’ routing very easy, you readily get into the habit of filing direct. And it generally works out, until ...it suddenly does not.
Before departing, we learned there was a cold front just to the west of HAO, extending from northern Ohio down to southern Kentucky. However, it was moving rapidly to the east, leaving us to expect a cold and blustery, but clear VFR, arrival. Our thinking was we would make (traffic and winds permitting) a straight- in visual approach to runway 11 at HAO, from a very long final that started at FL 430, engines at idle all the way down. But, as we our started our descent, it was obvious the
28 • TWIN & TURBINE
frontal system’s eastward movement had slowed. We could see the front’s towering clouds in front of us, and mid-Ohio airports were reporting a mixture of rain, snow, and low-IFR ceilings and visibility, plus ice and snow on the runways.
HAO is a non-controlled airport, but it does have an ASOS, so from 100 miles out we dial up that frequency, only to find it silent. We then call Minneapolis Center and ask them if they know the weather or approach in use at HAO. They reply “unable on Butler information... approach might have it...two controllers away.” They clear us down to FL200, direct to HAO. A couple of frequencies later, we are down to 13,000 and talking to Cincinnati Approach, who is expecting us to proceed direct to the airport, as cleared by Center. We are in clouds and turbulence, still unable to get the ASOS, and strongly suspecting conditions at HAO are not at all VFR. We ask the approach controller if he can obtain the Butler weather for us. He replies ‘negative’, and promptly asks our intentions.
This is where filing ‘direct to the airport’ in a busy area gets you in
trouble. Our “intentions” were to make a straight-in visual approach from the west, but that plan is clearly no longer viable. The truth is, we are now in solid IMC doing 250 knots, 10 minutes from the airport and neither we nor our new controller know what we are going to do or, given the absent ASOS, what we “should” do.
We tell the approach controller our intentions are to make an instrument approach into HAO, but we first need to know the runway in use. He is busy as all get out, and sounds a bit ticked off that we got dumped on him without this already being worked out, or at least being assigned one of the published standard arrival routes (STARS).
Not knowing what approach to vector us to, he temporizes by giving us a long, multi-waypoint clearance, with many altitude changes, the end point being the Cincinnati VOR (CVG) at 8,000 feet. We quickly scribble it down, enter it into the Universal FMS, and go about doing exactly as we were told, but with a nagging sense of discomfort about what we are going to do when reaching CVG. We then get the brilliantly-simple idea
Doing It The
By Kevin Ware
JUNE 2015