Page 12 - May 2019

the few minutes saved by skirting a thunderstorm. It is simply not worth it. You might get away with it once, twice or a hundred times, but if you play with snakes, the snake will bite somewhere along the way – and the strike could be deadly. And a thunderstorm is no garter snake; it’s an emotionless viper full of deadly venom.
Closing Thoughts
While I’m a big believer in onboard radar, I’m not a believer of using onboard radar to skirt a storm. The pilots who “go tactical” should avoid the most potent of the deadly venom (storm convection), but going tactical can lure you close enough
to the storm so that lightning and hail can ruin your day, your airplane or even your career if you are a professional pilot.
If you have onboard radar in your air- plane but don’t know exactly how to use it, don’t even think about going tactical near a thunderstorm. In my experience as a long-time instructor in the twin and turbine community, most pilots do not know how to properly operate onboard radar. Some have been to a classroom- only radar class, but the vast majority have not experienced years of mentor- ship by a true radar veteran (like most airline/military pilots), and don’t have the experience to roll the dice around thunderstorms.
Operating onboard radar is an art and a science. You need to understand how it works, and you also need the real-time experience to make it tell you where the deadly snake lies. If you blunder into a thunderstorm, you’ll either not live to tell the story, or the story you tell will be of sheer terror and a bent airplane. The convection in a thunderstorm is greater than you or your airplane can handle; a thunderstorm will win every time. Avoid- ance is your only option. Drift away from thunderstorms, and the life you save may be your own.
Joe Casey is an FAA-DPE and an ATP, CFI, CFII (A/H), MEI, CFIG, CFIH, as well as a U.S. Army UH-60 standardization instructor/exam- iner. An MMOPA Board member, he has been a PA46 instructor for 16-plus years and has accumulat- ed 12,000-plus hours of flight time, 5,500 of which has been in the PA46. Contact Joe at: www.flycasey.com, by email at joe@flycasey.com, or by phone at 903.721.9549.
10 • TWIN & TURBINE / May 2019
Ocean Reef Club