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Pilot Confessions
Caught In a Nighttime Thunderstorm by Joe Casey
There are 30,000-plus thunder- storms on the face of the earth every day. That is a shocking- ly large but factual number. Thunderstorms are easy to find on most of our planet. So, if you are a pi- lot, you’ll get to make some decisions about circumnavigating and avoiding them. If it hasn’t happened already, you will have to decide how close to get to a thunderstorm in the future.
Alarmingly, accident records show that pilots choose to fly into thunder- storms with far too much frequency, and many of those airplanes don’t come out the other side in one piece. A thunderstorm is a deadly cocktail with all the nasty ingredients required for a fatality, and any one of those in- gredients can take you out of the sky.
4 • TWIN & TURBINE / October 2022
Lightning, hail, wind shear, ic- ing and convection exist in ev- ery thunderstorm.
So, how did I find myself in the throes of a large thunderstorm com- plex at night? How did a (then) 12,000- plus hour aviator, CFI, and examiner make such a decision? Well, I didn’t wake up that morning with suicidal thoughts, but I did wake up with a strong desire to get home. Usually, that is all that is needed to start the accident chain in aviation.
Get-Home-Itis
I woke up in Louisville, Kentucky, and started the day training with a client in his Piper Mirage. This was the last day of a five-day trip and I was ready to go home. So, when the proverbial quit-work whistle blew at 5
p.m., I already had the tie-down ropes off and the chocks removed from my Cessna 310. The problem was a huge weather system that stretched from the Great Lakes deep into the Gulf of Mexico. This was a cold front with a line of thunderstorms at the frontal boundary and a bunch of disorganized cells further ahead on the warm (east) side of the front.
I planned to fly as far southwest as possible, choose an airport to land, let the storm pass, and hope the front moved quickly so I could resume my flight back home that evening after the frontal passage. I flew around a bunch of unorganized and small storms on my first leg, landing in Memphis for fuel. Nighttime was beginning to over- take the day, and the vast storms out