Joe Zuffoletto

Mine was a severe turbulence encounter in September 2010 while returning to Denver on an aborted flight to Orange County, CA. Extremely high westerly winds (70-100 kts) were forecast over the Rockies from the CO-WY border northward at the time of my flight. Winds along my route of flight were forecast at only 20kts. Well, the strong winds dipped much farther south much sooner than forecast, and my wife and I launched right into the teeth of them. We were making only 40-50 knots over the ground above the Continental Divide and it was a real slog, so we decided to try another day. As you can imagine, the chaos created just downwind of the Rockies over Denver was incredible. By far the worst turbulence I've ever encountered, in severe clear conditions. At one point we experienced an uncommanded pitch downward of about 35-40 degrees that completely emptied the baggage compartment into the backs of our heads (the tie-down straps had already failed). We also had multiple negative-G encounters. My poor wife was terrified and bawling her eyes out. After what seemed to be an eternity we safely landed one hour later at our home airport. First and only time I kissed the ground after a flight.

Quote: Seth While no Rockies, the Appalachian Mountains run up the eastern US and divide the east Coast from the Ohio Valley and the plains of the center of the United States. Whenever I head to OH, IL, IN, WV, and believe it or not (unless you live or fly there regularly) NC and VA, you have plenty of terrain to deal with, and unless you are real high, you get bumps of some sort. If you look at the airspace around DC, on the west side the Class Bravo outer ring rises very quickly to allow enough clearance for the baby mountains. At first when flying I just thought the thermals got bad around here but I've learned a lot of it is air masses moving down the mountains and spilling out toward the shore. Some of it is thermals, but a lot is not. Ned - I'm sorry we missed meeting each other - just a few days before I was able to meet up with Erik for about 20 minutes. However, I have never really experienced flying where I couldn't climb or maintain 9000' without running the engine hard. I have had a hard time holding an altitude due to getting slammed around, but that's when you request a block altitude. No matter what, whenever I'm flying over WV, I get bounced around. With the windy conditions yesterday, I knew it would be a turbulent flight. It is amazing how it is hard to know around here when it looks like a clear day and you are immediately slammed by the mountain waves (not like the Rockies again) or the thermals. I love the days when it's smooth as glass with no bumps at any low altitude. Separately, I love looking at my WX seeing the frontal line, and then looking out and seeing the cloud line in the same location as the frontal line on the map. The closer you are to the frontal boundaries, usually the more bumpy it is (again, usually). Anyone ever experience a massive frontal downdraft or mountain waves? I was lucky to be up this morning getting an IPC, and it was still rather bumpy. I never climbed above 4000 feet as we practiced multiple approaches at BWI and GAI. Glad you made it home safe! -Seth

Quote: N4352H Last commerical flight I took to Co-Springs...... you couldn't poke a golf tee up my butt. Our mountains are 2200'...your's are 10,000'.

Sounds like the crap we put up with almost all the time here in Colorado!

I absolutely love my BrightLine bag, and now they've advanced to the point where you can custom configure your own bag with their highly modular system. Check them out and good luck!

Filmed on a trip I took from Denver to El Paso this past weekend.

Skywarrior: I used the Nflightcam + and the special lens/filter for aviation.

Ken, Thanks! I'll give it a try. Joe

Here's one I shot yesterday of a 30-minute flight around Denver. Used the Nflightcam and plugged it into the headphone jack. Need to figure out how to filter out the high-frequency noise from the electrical system. I've tried the GoPro and the Nflightcam and I definitely like the Nflightcam better. I used the bar mount to attach it to the steel tubing behind the windscreen, which is a much better solution than using adhesive to attach the GoPro to the glare shield. You can capture your aircraft radio with the Nflightcam but not the GoPro. The Nflightcam also has a better picture with more saturated colors, in my opinion. Finally, the ability to aim the camera using your iPhone and Bluetooth is an awesome feature. With the GoPro you have to guess. Nflightcam's magic lens for reducing prop effect didn't work as well as I expected, but it's good enough for me.

Ken: It's ordinary video, shot 1080p at 30fps. I used Final Cut Pro X on the Mac to time-compress it. I compressed it by 20x, so one hour becomes 3 minutes.

Thank you all for watching and for your comments. Scott from Iowa: I was VFR at 16,500', about 2,000' to 3,000' above the highest peaks. Durango itself is at 6,600'; you can see that I descended quite a bit at the end. I'm very proud of my taxiing speeds, thank you very much. Do you know how many years it took me to hone my reflexes enough to pull it off? This morning I tried the NFlightCam by Contour for a short flight around Denver. The video is downloading to my computer as I speak. If it's any good I'll post it to another thread later today, and I'll post another thread with my thoughts about the NFlightCam vs. GoPro HD for in-flight video capture.

I shot this video two days ago using a GoPro HD camera mounted on the glare shield of my Acclaim Type S. It's a flight from Denver Centennial (KAPA) to Durango La Plata (KDRO). It starts out at normal speed, then kicks into afterburner mode to make it more interesting. Enjoy!

It just depends on your mission. I'm based at Denver Centennial and 90% of my flights are to the west, so I cross the Rockies a lot. I also cross the Sierras in CA a lot because we have family and a property in San Francisco. These are very high mountain ranges and during the winter months especially, strong westerlies flow over both of them creating lots of turbulence down low and strong to severe mountain waves on the eastern escarpments. I've seen downdrafts exceeding 3,000fpm on bad days in these waves. As far as I'm concerned, the safest and most comfortable way to deal with these conditions is to top them, which at FL200 or so you almost always can. Need a turbo for that. As far as maintenance goes, I owned a 1998 Encore for 11 years and put about 1,000 hours on it during that time. I can't recall a single maintenance event specific to the turbo. I'm sure it added some marginal cost to my annuals for inspections, etc., but that's it. The jury's still out on my new Acclaim, which I haven't had long enough to comment on yet.

Quote: thinwing Colojo...are you time traveling or what?...you bought a 1980 aircraft at age 35 and just 12 years later buy a 28year newer mooney at age 47...whats your secret??

PPL at age 21 Instrument rating at age 30 First airplane, 1980 Piper Archer II, at age 35 Second airplane, 1998 Mooney Encore, at age 36 Third (and current) airplane, 2008 Mooney Acclaim Type S, at age 47

Aren't those the halos?

Sole owner. Works best for me.

Thanks to all who responded. Factory Direct Models it is! This model of an Acclaim very similar to mine is what sold me. Can't wait to get it! http://www.factorydirectmodels.com/FD11-1572.html

I want to get one of those custom, handmade models made of my Acclaim Type S. I love the model I had made years ago for my Encore, but that outfit is no longer in business. Has anyone out there had a model made of their Mooney that they just love, and can you point me to the outfit that made it? Thanks.

I had lunch yesterday with a buddy who's a video expert. He says the prop effect we see in so many cameras these days is due to the way the CMOS sensor captures each frame. Basically, it paints the frame onto the sensor one line at a time, similar to a television, and that's what causes the prop effect. The only solution is to get a CMOS sensor that paints the entire frame at once. These sensors exist in very high end cameras such as Red. He says it will be a year or two before they trickle down to consumer grade cameras.