The weather had been nasty most of the morning, when I arrived at the airport the ceiling was 009 OVC 012 BKN with lightning distant in all quadrants. Not exactly optimum for our day of VFR traffic reporting but we waited. As the winds seemed to die down and the ceilings lifted, I called the tower on the phone asking for an update. They said there was strong precipitation to the west but we should be able to sneak out shortly if we wished to.
Having the pressures of a commercial pilot and the need to “get the job done” my co-pilot and I opted to go.
Shortly after taking off we encountered a wall of rain, after a quick look at our Garmin 396 (thank god for XM weather) we turned southeast towards the beach where it looked to be clear.
Our ability to report traffic was limited as the the accidents were on the north side of town which was unattainable due to weather.
After about an hour of flying up and down the beach we caught a break and headed north despite what our guts said and what the 396 showed us weather wise.
We arrived on scene of an accident and began circling. It was a bad one a hit and run if I recall properly. Preoccupied in getting a detailed report we forgot about the encroaching weather until it was to late. We were hit with a down draft that dropped us 500 feet. After attempting to climb back up we leveled the wings and headed home. That is, we would have if we weren’t surrounded by clouds as dark as night with walls of water coming closer and closer.
Another gust threw our 172 into a 50 degree bank causing us to drop to an altitude of just 400 feet. At 400 feet we were just under the bases of the clouds. We began to scud run one pilot watching for obstacles the other maintain positive control of the airplane. We continued to get blown up and down entering and exiting the storm frequently.
Soon we realized that the only way home was through Mayport’s class Delta airspace. That is if they would even let us through VFR. I asked my co-pilot to take the controls as I keyed up the mic.
“Mayport tower Traffic watch eight zero mike”
“Traffic watch eight zero mike this is Mayport tower go ahead”
“Mayport tower traffic watch eight zero mike, five miles to your north trying to out run a storm back to Craig and we might need to transition your class Delta.”
“Sir, I see nothing but precip on my screen, you do whatever it takes to get back as soon as possible I’ll notify Craig of your arrival.”
“thank you sir”
A somewhat informal conversation with Mayport but we got the point across. Flying at just 400 feet I switched off to Craig tower who was more then helpful. They cleared us to land on 23 and reported the winds 270 at 20 gusting to 30 and the peak wind has just occurred 5 minutes ago from 290 at 45.
I knew we were in for a white knuckle landing. With no need to start a decent (the downdrafts did that for us) we turned onto a right base for 23. Landing with no flaps and about 1500 RPMs to even stay aloft we smoothly touched down upwind wheel first followed by the remaining two, we added in our cross wind correction and taxied back to the hanger with a sigh of relief.
Upon reaching the hanger we turned the avionics off and pulled the mixture to idle, then like opening the floodgates the heaviest rain I had ever seen in my life fell on us.
My co-pilot and I just sat in the airplane and counted our blessings. We made a promise to never “push it” again.
