Me and the guy I’m living with here at Skymates managed to snag a Seminole for the weekend (rare we can take it for that long), so we decided to take a long cross country. We nailed it down to Michigan, Orlando or Arizona. We finally decided to go to PHX on Friday night, go up to the Grand Canyon on Saturday, back to Phoenix that night and then back to Arlington on Sunday. That wasn’t going to end up happening.

We did the pre-flight planning and performance calculations for the airports we would be going to be at on Thursday. We decided there were a few airports we didn’t want to depart with full tanks, but we should be fine with all our departures. Then the fun starts.

We were going to get going Friday evening, but then the plane fell apart. We had the left electric fuel pump fail on us before we departed, so we were not going to be able to make our departure out. A mechanic checked it out and got it working so we would get out the next morning.

We got up early Saturday morning, kind of went overboard on the pre-flight with the problems that we had with the plane, but decided it was airworthy. We started up, got to the runup area and we notice the left alternator had failed. We taixed back, told the mechanic and he said he didn’t think it had failed, but it was just not paired up well with the other alternator. He did some adjusting, and sure enough the left alternator came back up online and didn’t give us any problems for the rest of the trip. In fact the plane performed very well, giving us no problems at all.

We got to about ABQ and called flight watch to see if we were going to have any problems getting over to St.John’s Arizona. When we had left there were no storms that were on the route that would stop us. There were a few isolated cells that didn’t look like they would prove to be any problem. By the time we got to ABQ about 5 hours later the situation had changed completely. We checked the weather, but the situation had became much worse than what any of the briefers thought it would.

We made a stop at Double Eagle in ABQ to check the weather ourselves and the southwest was a disaster area. Starting at about ABQ and going to what looked like California was filled with thunderstorms everywhere, lots more than the one or two isolated small cells that were there earlier. I called a briefer to see what was up, and he said that moisture from Hurricane Emily ended up getting thrown into the southwest, and with the heat that is in that area it turned the entire region into the breeding grounds for thunderstorms. This happened yesterday between the time we left and the time we got to ABQ because the briefer that we talked to when we left Arlington told us that the area was espically dry and that we shouldn’t have a problem making to Phoenix. So much for forcasts.

When we checked the weather in Arlington it looked like we could get to PHX without much of a problem but the situation changed en route. The moral of this story? Have a plan A, plan B and a place C. Our first “go” decision was at Arlington in the morning when it looked like we could complete the flight. That decision has to be re-evaluated throughout the flight to make sure that it is still the best thing to do. When we got to ABQ, it looked like the situation had changed and that we were working with old information that needed to be updated. That meant that we needed to stop, get out of the plane and check the weather to see what had happened while en route. At this point we revaluated the situation and decided that it was not a smart idea to continue the flight, even though earlier in the morning everything had looked good and we launched. Our planning looked something like this:

Plan A - Try to make to PHX

Plan B - If we can not make it to PHX, stop somewhere, check the weather and turn around, there is NO reason to continue a flight into conditions that your aircraft can’t handle just because you were able to make that initial “go” decision. Plan A needs to constantly revised to make sure that it is still a viable option.

Plan C - Get a hotel where we stop (happened to be ABQ) and wait out the weather. We could have gotten out early the next morning before any lifting activity had started.

I know this is old news to a lot of people, but when you’re just starting into the cross country phase of learning how to fly it can be hard to not focus on the goal and realize that sometimes you can not complete a flight as planned, even when things looked fine when you started. What you need to remember is that you need to have multiple ways out of any situation you get yourself into while flying, and that the process of continuing a flight is a constant re-evaluation of whether it is prudent or possible to continue the flight.