IFR through Towering Cumbulus

[apenney]

Thanks, Don.  I appreciate the feedback.  I definitely gained a better appreciation of the power of even the smallest of these clouds.

[irishpilot]

Stay away from towering Cumulonimbus. Cumulus are popcorn-like and the rate of growth will often dictate their turbulence. Dewpoint and freezing levels are terms to be familiar with.

Modern tools that can help in-cickpit are ADS-B, XM WX, Foreflight connected to a Stratus, etc.

Lastly, when talking to Center, the earlier you ask for deviations, the better And, as always, when in doubt, wait it out.

Sent from my SM-N950U using Tapatalk

[amillet]

I flew home from Aurora OR Monday.  30 minutes later a tornado touched down in Portland right where I took the photos 

[N201MKTurbo]

9 hours ago, donkaye said:

Remember Scott Crossfield

24 years ago or so, I was at an aviation symposium in downtown Phoenix. I was walking around with my 2 year old son on my shoulders. This old guy came up and started tickling and playing with my son.

It was Scott Crossfield - he was a nice happy guy.

[aviatoreb]

9 hours ago, amillet said:

I flew home from Aurora OR Monday.  30 minutes later a tornado touched down in Portland right where I took the photos 

 

About 10 years ago - when my IFR was still relatively fresh and not terribly wet, I did something pretty dumb on a day that looked just like what you are showing.  One single CB - a "little one" like in your picture was in my path - and I was on an IFR flight plan despite severe clear as I usually do when I go to the Washington DC area to keep myself straight and true in that environment of so many rules to bust - anyway it was a very warm day so no worry of ice at 10,000 - and I was right near the top of the cloud and zoom I went right through, clipped right across the top maybe 500 feet from the top and.  I was in it for like 15 seconds.  I was very surprised that not only was it very very bumpy for such a small cloud - and by the stuff jumping off your seat standard - moderate to severe - but also it was raining incredibly hard in there - There was so much rain for like 15 seconds it was shocking.  Luckily above freezing but if had been below freezing I would have been plastered with clear ice.

I never did that again.

[takair]

A couple of other thoughts.  If you can’t avoid them, at least slow down before entering them.  Definitely below the yellow arc, but be prepared to slow below maneuvering speed.  Yes, this keeps you in the stuff longer, but the ride is more tolerable.  I wouldn’t want to get too slow though, you want some extra control margin.   Also, tighten your belts before entering, to keep your head off the ceiling. Also, remember that this stuff can be embedded too.  This makes avoidance more difficult.  This is where looking at the big picture ahead of time helps.  Best avoid the entire area.

[N201MKTurbo]

I've been in a level 5 cell. All this talk about maintaining any particular airspeed is crazy talk. Keeping between the red line and stall is as good as it gets sometimes. I saw the airspeed needle go almost all the way around in a few seconds with no substantial change in attitude or power.

My suggestion is to keep the wings as level as possible and the pitch as level as possible. Reduce the power when the airspeed gets high and increase the power when the airspeed gets low. Don't worry about altitude, much. 

I wouldn't try to turn around, most cells are kind of small, just keep it pointing in the same general direction and you will be out of it in a minute or two. (Knocking on wood and throwing salt over my shoulder)

In this encounter I asked ATC to return to the airport. After getting back on the ground, I checked the radar and I actually flew almost all the way through it then turned around and flew back through it again.

A life changing event! The outcome was not certain. 

 

This was after waiting over 8 hours to depart. I called Flight Service about every 1/2 hour or so. I waited anxiously for the next 1/2 hour old radar picture to come up on the FBO's DOS computer. At about 3 in the afternoon Flight Service and I both agreed that it was doable. After I landed the pilot of the Gulfstream that landed after me came over and chewed me out for flying in that weather without onboard weather radar.

Get Homeits can kill!

1992 Bethany OK 

Edited July 6, 2019 by N201MKTurbo

[irishpilot]

My suggestion is to keep the wings as level as possible and the pitch as level as possible. Reduce the power when the airspeed gets high and increase the power when the airspeed gets low. Don't worry about altitude, much. 

A life changing event! The outcome was not certain.  

Agreed. Severe turbulence is a scary experience. Just keeping level attitude is not a guarantee.

Fly Safe,
Safety Forum Mod

[Hank]

This type of baby "towering cumulus" is probably OK. I was at 6500 and VFR, but would likely have deviated enough to miss it IFR. Puffy cumulus aren't a problem, but I don't like them when they start to build vertically. 

[FloridaMan]

8500 can be violent enough to outclimb the airplane and have hail. I’ve had my windows ice up in VMC flying over clouds, well clear at 13,000 from the moisture shooting out of the tops, so you can get icing when outside of visible moisture. 

 

Here is a video I made of clouds at 17,500. Use the slider to run the video quickly and you can see the rapid growth. I’ve seen them develop faster than this at 8,000ft too. 

 

Edited July 6, 2019 by FloridaMan

[M20F]

3 hours ago, Hank said:

This type of baby "towering cumulus" is probably OK. I was at 6500 and VFR, but would likely have deviated enough to miss it IFR. Puffy cumulus aren't a problem, but I don't like them when they start to build vertically. 

I echo Hanks comments.  The folks talking about 1000 FPM +/- in a building cumulus with tops around 6000ft, not sure what we are talking about.  Be safe and know your limits but at the same time know what is going on.  

I would hate for somebody to run out of gas and crash going around a cloud like Hank shows because they thought it would be filled with soccer ball sized hail. 

Weather will kill you for sure but 90% of the weather out there you can navigate.  Don’t let that lull you into flying into the other 10% but don’t let it keep you on the ground or do dumb things to avoid a rain shower.  

[cliffy]

 

ABSOLUTELY PERFECT RESPONSE BELOW FROM DON!

"The Instrument Rating is a great rating to have, but for our airplanes it is great for getting through an overcast and flying in stratus with moderate rain. Convective activity in the clouds, NO.  Not even the clouds shown in your picture, which definitely should be flown around.   As you gain more experience and understand the weather better, then the decision making process becomes easier.  At 250 total hours you are definitely not there, yet, as your recently gained experiences shows.  I'd keep it VERY conservative.

Don Kaye, Nine time Master CFI with both SAFE and NAFI"

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I find it interesting that the older you get (and the more experience you get) you tend to get more conservative with every flight. I learned a long time ago to never tickle the edge because you can never tell exactly where the edge is in flying and you don't want to see the other side of it. 

Even in the big iron I flew around WAY more tall clouds than I flew through. There is just no up side if you guess wrong AND guessing is what you are doing. I've seen the green clouds. I've seen the hail. I've seen the lightning from the inside. I've seen the turbulence that rattles your eyeballs. I've seen more ice than I ever want to see again so I guess that's why I'm now DAY VFR only,  in my little Mooney. 

Discretion really is the better part of valor!

BTW, I loved active  on-board RADAR! It is a life saver. 

[gsxrpilot]

2 hours ago, cliffy said:

I find it interesting that the older you get (and the more experience you get)

But please don't discourage the kids out there. We've got enough problems with kids these days afraid to do anything more dangerous than the next level on their X-box. If you've had your years of adventure and are done with it, I'm envious. But I've got a bit more adventuring to go before I catch up to you.

I read @201er account of his trip to the Arctic circle in his J a few years back and while I couldn't replicated it, I did make a fun trip to Churchill, Manitoba and back from Austin. It involved low IFR, freezing temps, a touch of ice, and plenty of deviations around the really ugly stuff. There was also some detailed fuel management to allow for navigation to airports without any 100LL. Now Mike's on another quick 4th of July weekend trip to the great white north. And I'm on Skyvector working out the next adventure.

Someday I'll be done and ready to stay in the pattern, but I got a late start and so today, on my 52nd birthday, I'm planning more adventures. I'm trying to catch up on the "experience" as fast as I can. 

[cliffy]

Not trying to discourage anyone at all, just giving a reality check from being there for so many years. Last I checked it was called "mentoring"

I hope you do have many years of fine, safe adventures as your posts seem to indicate. I'm just coming from a different  perspective of experience and having seen the aftermaths of many who guessed wrong. I've got many personal friends who are no longer here because they "guessed" wrong in different aspects of flying. 

My mantra-  "You are not a safe pilot until you are "tempered". You are not tempered until you do something in an airplane that scares the living s*%t out of you and you know you did it to yourself. It gives flying an entirely new perspective. "

The older you get, the less chances you take, as the time left becomes more precious. 

[201er]

There’s different stuff that will qualify as towering cumulus. There’s a tall cumulus cloud and there’s a pseudo thunderstorm. You won’t see me going through the ones towering to 20,000ft+! But the ones topping out usually by 12 or 14k can be rough but manageable. 

One of the worst ones I’d ever been through was off the coast of Mexico near Conzumel enroute to Belize. Forget about ADSB or XM out there. It was a moderatedly tall cumulus tower, maybe topping out at 15,000. But if nothing, the dark grey color should have given it away as trouble. Went in one side dry, came out the other end drenched. Pouring cats and dogs would have been a light drizzle compared to what this was. Picture dropping a bucket of water on the windshield but continuously and everywhere. Couldn’t hear anything cause it was pouring so loud. Lost about 40 knots between the sink and the rain but managed to come out maintaining altitude and having received a complimentary pressure wash.

Saw a 20,000ft towering cu over Labrador enroute to Goose Bay on this recent trip. Luckily my planned waypoint had me just go around it as is but if it didn’t, I would have been going around anyway. Avoided a Cumulus top at 10,000 by going around while at 9,000 because temp was already only +1 or 2 outside of it. Ice can build really quickly in those.

Edited July 7, 2019 by 201er

[carusoam]

Experience to gain along the way...

what the cumulus clouds look like from a distance... in some parts of the country the thunderstorms are discrete cells leaving a dark shadow on the ground... and lightning bolts out the bottom...

They show up nicely on the strike finder and you can calibrate the device with your eyes...

Those are the easy ones to see and avoid...

 

When the cloud tops are below 10k’, and the bottom of the clouds aren’t very thick... there isn’t much vertical development going on...

You will still get bumped around a bit in and out of them... but it sure isn’t smooth any longer...

 

Where the fun ends...  thunderstorms... this is where the clouds can be reaching 20 -40k’... the vertical speeds are measured in +/- thousands of fpm....

Advice is often to maintain speeds and ask ATC to clear a range of altitudes for you... because you may be climbing easily exceeding 1k’pm... descending to stay level will start exceeding any speed limit you would like to maintain....

Avoiding the thunderstorms that are hidden in IMC... takes some planning... and equipment... strike finders are real time data...XM can have some real delays...

Monsters grow in minutes... and can elude traditional XM and ADSB radar...

It is good to be going slow before the iPad leaves your knee....  your passengers don’t like it very much when their iPad hits the ceiling... (so I have heard... )

 

Good news... following the guidance applied by everyone, and training.... very few Mooneys have been torn apart in thunderstorms... could be a sign that they got better training than the other guys...

Another thing to know... getting weather briefings while aloft... this was something I always heard about... by the time you really need one... so do about 25 other planes on the same frequency...   if the crappy weather is 100s of miles long... it’s a lot more than 25 pilots on the same frequency...

PP thoughts only, I got ADSB in quickly after my First embedded thunderstorm experience... my strike finder had gotten overloaded quickly... lightning strikes in all directions...

 

Lightning storms and ice are still the enemy of IFR flight... learn what it takes to set your limits... know your way around or go back...

Best regards,

-a-

[ArtVandelay]

My top 2 goals for my aviation hobby:
Don’t be a local news story.
Don’t have any stories I can share on the internet.
I like my flights to be boring.


Tom

[Mooney in Oz]

A stormscope is a handy tool for the detection of electrical activity, however it has its limitations as not all convection activity will emanate enough electricity to be detectable by the stormscope.  Keep a safe distance from any type of convection activity.

10 hours ago, gsxrpilot said:

today, on my 52nd birthday

Happy Birthday Paul!

[Danb]

Have a great day Paul HB 

[FloridaMan]

I would not argue that there is a safe cloud height to navigate through. If there is vertical development, there is, or was, convection in it. I found myself in an embedded buildup at night in Florida in my M20F. I kept my airspeed at just over Vy and continued to climb -- my logic was I wanted as much altitude as I could get to recover from an upset. It required working the controls to the stops to maintain wings level, which is all that I worried about: airspeed and right-side up. Eventually I came out of the side at around 9000ft and the top wasn't much higher than that. Oftentimes in the Rocket, I'll look down at the Nexrad and see solid red around me when I'm over the tops at 10,000ft. There can be some absolutely nasty convective stuff that doesn't go that high up. An experienced Mooney IA and pilot once told me about a customer who had an M20K and there was a small buildup in front of him. He said the radar painted something, but he didn't trust the radar. ATC said they didn't see anything, so he went through the cloud. There was enough hail inside that cloud to beat the leading edges of the wings flat and it totaled the airframe. 

Edited July 7, 2019 by FloridaMan

[N201MKTurbo]

20 hours ago, cliffy said:

My mantra-  "You are not a safe pilot until you are "tempered". You are not tempered until you do something in an airplane that scares the living s*%t out of you and you know you did it to yourself. It gives flying an entirely new perspective. "

I couldn't say it any better. 

I tell some of the pilots I talk to about scary incidents and how they will change your flying and they start telling me about this little thing and that little thing that they thought was scary. 

If you think you are tempered, you are not. When it happens you will know it for sure.

[N201MKTurbo]

21 hours ago, cliffy said:

 I've seen the green clouds. 

I was wondering if anyone was going to talk about the colors. 

When I first started flying there were still a lot of WWII pilots hanging out at the airport. I asked an old P51 pilot what they did about thunderstorms. He said he would bite on his pencil to keep from chipping his teeth. He said they would fly right through them, after all there were no Germans in the thunderstorms. He feared the Germans more than the storms.

He told me that you know you are in a storm when you see the colors. When I was in that storm in OK my whole world turned yellow then green then blue. It would have been very cool if I didn't think I was going to die! It must be some sort of rainbow effect going on. 

Edited July 7, 2019 by N201MKTurbo

[Hank]

3 hours ago, N201MKTurbo said:

I was wondering if anyone was going to talk about the colors. 

When I first started flying there were still a lot of WWII pilots hanging out at the airport. I asked an old P51 pilot what they did about thunderstorms. He said he would bite on his pencil to keep from chipping his teeth. He said they would fly right through them, after all there were no Germans in the thunderstorms. He feared the Germans more than the storms.

He told me that you know you are in a storm when you see the colors. When I was in that storm in OK my whole world turned yellow then green then blue. It would have been very cool if I didn't think I was going to die! It must be some sort of rainbow effect going on. 

I don't mind the milk bottle look, or even the several shades of gray. Not a big fan of the really dark colors. Hope to not see shades of green again, or those flashes of light through the gray with no way to tell distance--I was too busy staying level and watching the altimeter to look much at the storm scope. But it was nice when ATC gave me a block clearance then finally at my third request let me climb out of the soup to my filed altitude (10,000 msl over SC one June).

It was my wife's first IFR flight, too. She sat quietly beside me and let me concentrate on what I was doing. Can't ask any more than that! I thank God for a supportive wife, and will work very hard to not put her in a situation like that again. But as a newly rated Instrument pilot, I didn't know any better. There were no zero gravity moments, just rough, funny green, occasional yellow, flashing white glows and a whale of an updraft (10° nose down, reduced throttle, 1000+ fpm climb). Not for me again . . . .

Never heard of blue inside a cloud. Don't care to find out myself, but if you see any, please turn on your GoPro!  

[cliffy]

OK I'll relate a story about weather at night, in the hopes that if the crap ever hits the fan someone might find it useful to save their bacon.

Flying from ICT to SLC on night in a 737, as we passed DEN and entered the usual front range weather stuff (towering Q and flash bulbs, the RADAR took a dump. Nothing, nada, zilch. Here we are in the middle of it and we lose our "eyes" to the weather at night, IMC. Checked the usual, CBs, recycle, nothing. 

I fell back to a flight I had in a DC-3 many decades before when we didn't have RADAR and we encountered T storms coming out of Gallup, NM at night. I watched and learned as the old, veteran, DC-3 Captain flew around all the T storms.

In the 737, I followed his lead and turned the cockpit lights down low, rested my chin on the glare shield and watched out the window.  I had the copilot flying to my directions. ATC gave us 30 either side of course and as I saw a flash say 10 left of course I had the F/O turn 5 or 10 more right. As we passed that one I was looking ahead where the next flashes were grouped (these were just illuminating the IMC weather and not the bright electrical discharge). The next one might be dead ahead so I'd have him turn 20 left and so on. In about 70  miles we broke out into the clear on the west side.  Never hit a bump!

Although I don't recommend it as a usual practice, you can do pretty good (at night) this way if you have to fall back to basics and you are jammed into a corner. Remember, the guys that flew the Hump in WWII didn't have RADAR either, yet somehow they avoided the cells back then also!

As we broke into the clear my F/O said, "GEE, I've never seen anything like that before". I responded, "I learned that from am old DC-3 Captain a long time ago. Remember it and it might save your butt someday". 

[N201MKTurbo]

If you tune your ADF to a blank channel, the needle will usually point at lightning strikes.

But, alas, we all took them out a few years ago....