ragedracer1977

You might give a careful look at the weather tomorrow. The state of AZ is supposed to have one of the worst winter storms ever beginning tomorrow morning.

I'd like to learn more about that, what I assume is, skew-t graph. How do you get it? How do you read it?

I did.

I honestly can't say 100% no. I took the information available at the time and decided the margins were wide enough to go. Given an identical scenario, I probably would opt to go VFR instead. The flight home was a route of my choosing, at an altitude of my choosing. I filed IFR merely for the convenience, but in this case I ended up in worse weather than if I hadn't.

This was exactly my thought process. And I want to be clear, I posted this not because I think it was "neat" but to demonstrate that even with what I thought was a pretty safe plan, I still found ice and to document what I did when it happened. I knew there would be a couple folks who couldn't help themselves and would act like they always do, but I'm not afraid to post my mistakes so that others learning after me can come here and find examples and file it away in their library of how and why things happen. So, it's fine with me that I got attacked. And called inappropriate names. I knew what I was getting in to.

Winds bother you? When I see winds over 20kts at the field I drop what I'm doing and go flying if I can. Of course, maybe it should actually be guys like you the rest of us should be worried about hurting our rates. You're afraid to fly in anything but calm winds and CAVU, and the first time you get caught when it isn't... Bad news for the rest of our insurance bills.

To be honest, knowing what I know now, I would have just gone VFR and gone under everything. Just how I came home. My thought process was that there was a chance of icing, but with the temps at the tops being right at 0c, and rapidly increasing, it shouldn’t be an issue. Further, I was unaware that jets don’t get ice because they go faster. I thought I was being prudent by asking other pilots if they were getting ice at my altitude. If they had said yes, I was fully prepared to either cancel IFR and go underneath or turn around and go home.

Light rime

I did file a Pirep. I know that the big guys might not make a report, but I was actually asking approach, she was asking the guys on the same route and altitude and they were reporting negative

What would keep everyone else from picking up ice? I thought I was being overly cautious by soliciting pireps from other guys going the the same route and altitudes. I also did the math the other guy did and decided that while ice was possible, the OAT was high enough that it should have been just above 0c at the tops and quite above 0c very quickly in the descent. The clouds were also reported as broken to scattered, which did not turn out to be accurate. Im certainly not happy I got into icing, but I did my due diligence to mitigate the possibility. As it turned out, I was wrong. And Im certainly learning how to better avoid it next time.

Yes, it was. Just like every other trip where I decide to get in my plane. If I wasn’t willing to risk my life and the rest of you having to pay higher insurance rates, I wouldn’t even have a pilot certificate.

Pitot heat, carb heat, and windscreen defrost. So, not really lol.

Ditto

Flew over to San Diego. Forecast said broken around 5k with tops around 9. Kept asking for pirep on icing, but there had been no reports, and I was flying the same inbound route as all the jets into SAN and the corporate guys into MYF. Was getting vectored to the ILS and it was a lot more overcast than broken. Went into the clouds about 8500. Started picking up ice about 7k. I knew a 180 was going to take me as long (or longer) than getting out of the bottom so I asked for an expedited descent. Controller vectored me a different direction and cleared me down to 5. Picked up about a 1/4” of rime on the leading edges in about 5 minutes. I was in and out of the bases at 5, but not accumulating more and it was starting to melt. It was an interesting experience. First time I’ve ever seen legitimate ice. If I didn’t know the bases were so close, I would have turned around and gone home. it was really nice having another pilot sitting right seat, dialing radios, pushing buttons, etc so I could focus on flying.

I think the first order of business is to replace the wiring. We poked around everything and didn't find any breaks or shorts. Traced both leads all the way back to the Garwin cluster. Everything looks ok (but old and the jacket is cracking in places) right up to the connections at the probe. It's a combination of plastic tubing, tie string, electrical tape, knife connector and spade connectors. It might be something that mess that causes the intermittent issues or it could be the probe or gauge itself. We'll try rewiring first. That's cheap and easy.

Hypothetically speaking, What kind of spirits delivered to you would it take to get a guy to the top of the list?

It is required, unfortunately. Fortunately it's currently working, but something is going wrong as occasionally it isn't. I guess I need to trace the wire first, check connections on the back, and then the probe. See what I can see

So. .. any suggestions?

Mine looks like this

Thoughts on how to troubleshoot this? Most of the time, the gauge works fine, but now and then (and becoming more frequent) the gauge just reads nothing. I've checked connections behind the panel but everything looks ok. Could the probe itself be failing? Trying to get a grasp on what might be wrong before I hand it over to the AP

When I heard a 414 went down in Socal last week, I was sure it was gonna be this guy

Left you a message this morning.

I'll take one. Alan, I'll call you in the morning or if you want, shoot me a message here with your pay pal, or venmo or any electronic payment method and I'll take care of it tonight

Cool! Registered for the caravan and the formation clinic! This will be my first time at Oshkosh. I'm excited!

There’s a B2OSH clinic at DVT in 2 weeks! I hope they’ll take me and my correctly installed tail!