That doesn't look good!

[mwilk 1,104]

Took a little flight over northeast Australia today in the FSL A320 in P3D. I encountered a little rough weather along the coast.

 

[Kuragiman 227]

Drive right through the heart of it!  Be like Lieutenant Dan from Forest Gump!  Ride on the outside of your plane and scream at the storm, "YOU CALL THIS A STORM!?  BLOW YOU SOB!"

 

lol.   Great looking weather system.

[mwilk 1,104]

Drive right through the heart of it!  Be like Lieutenant Dan from Forest Gump!  Ride on the outside of your plane and scream at the storm, "YOU CALL THIS A STORM!?  BLOW YOU SOB!"

 

lol.   Great looking weather system.

I just skirted the edge of that one but during my descent I got in the middle of a nasty one and got tossed all over the place. I don't know if it was effects from AS16 or from the FSL A320 but I'd never been bounced around in P3D like that before.

[Steve Dra 7,573]

OK...the other Dallas simmer will chime in here....

Guys...have you looked at OUR weather map recently (as of 12:15am)

 

We's about to get slammed by weather just like that! 

 

Batten down the hatches guys!

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

OK...the other Dallas simmer will chime in here....

 

Not sure if you were referring to me, but yeah, it's 12:38 and starting to pour here. I live next to KDAL facing 13L and can barely see the runway lights.

[Chock 17,769]

Nice shot. I'd definitely be steering around that one.

Reminds me of a day many years ago when I was doing an advanced flying course. This is a long story, but trust me, it's a good one.

This happened on an airfield in Derbyshire in the late 90s, where I was doing an advanced flying course. We were at the flight line, readying the aeroplane when I saw lightning flashes on the horizon as my instructor and I were donning our parachutes. Seeing that the storm was likely heading our way, I said to him: "Should we be taking off with that coming for us?" "Yeah, we'll be fine." he replied. I wasn't so sure, but made the mistake of trusting his judgement instead of my own, because I assumed with him being an instructor, he must know what he's talking about. Boy was I wrong...

A few minutes later I was in control for the take off, into the wind of course, looking at that storm on the horizon getting nearer as I climbed out from the airfield. As I leveled off at 1,200 feet, the instructor took control and he turned us away from the storm and flew us over to near Derwent Reservoir (that's the reservoir where 617 Squadron practiced for the Dambuster Raid in their Lancaster bombers, so you know the kind of terrain we're talking about here if you've ever seen the Dambusters movie).

Unfortunately, whilst we were flying to there, the storm came up behind us and overtook us. Unknown to me, since he was sat behind me where I could not see his face, the instructor was freaking out, having realised that he had dropped us in the s***. Sat in the front, I was blissfully unaware of that when I heard him say to me: "You have control." I remember thinking, 'yeah, thanks a lot for giving me control now.' but even at that point I thought because this was an advanced flying course, this was some kind of really extreme and clever lesson which was going to impart some pearl of aviation wisdom on me, because in my naivety at the time, I assumed all instructors always would know what they were doing. I soon found out otherwise, although ironically, what ensued did teach me an important lesson. We began to be thrown around all over the sky, lightning flashes were everwhere, the sky was a leaden doom-laden dark grey, rain hammered on the canopy and worryingly, massive downdrafts from the storm forced us lower and lower.

At the point where I started getting level with some of the higher surrounding hills, I decided to give up trying to fly us out of it and bow to what I thought was going to be the instructor's greater experience of piloting. Of course not being that experienced a pilot back then, I still hadn't realised what a massive screw up the instructor had made. I thought he would get us out of it, so I said to him: 'I'm having trouble here, I can't climb and we're getting pretty low, I think you'd better take over." Total silence from the guy. So I said it again. Still no reply, so I loosened my straps and hoisted myself up a bit in the seat so I could turn round to face him in the back seat and say it again, it was then I realised that he'd completely frozen up, and I mean he was literally catatonic. Well, you can imagine what the next thing I said was; it rhymes with 'oh flit.'

So I had no choice but to retighten my straps and stay on the controls. Down and down we went, with those damn downdrafts pushing us lower and lower under the massive storm. By this point I was literally looking up at houses on the hillsides, which I could just make out through the hammering grey rain, it was really dark too. I started to look for somewhere to land, but in that part of Derbyshire, nearly all the fields are too small to get an aeroplane down into, as they are on hilly terrain, not very big, and generally surrounded by dry stone walls, which I did not fancy crashing into, especially since I was in the front seat lol and where there aren't fields, there are a lot of wooded hillsides. So I began to toy with the idea of taking the thing down in between two trees, if I could find a suitable pair, in the hope that I'd break the wings off and hopefully slow us down in the process, although I didn't hold out much hope of us slowing down easily on what would be soaking wet grass.

Fortunately, whilst making a slow turn to see if I could spot somewhere suitable to try a crash landing, I felt the left wing pitch up; we'd hit the updraft on the edge of the storm cell. So I immediately threw the aeroplane into a steep turn and began circling in that updraft, and I managed to scrape the thing up to 800 feet on the altimeter, and although the pressure had undoubtedly changed, so I couldn't be sure it was 800 feet, it looked to be about enough height to make it back to the airfield at a low, but feasible circuit height. So I broke out of the turn and headed for the airfield. However, I'd forgotten one thing which I should have realised, given that it wasn't much of a struggle to get back to the airfield, even with only 800 feet of altitude to play with and still a lot of downdrafts around. Yup, you guessed it, with the storm having come over the airfield, the wind was now blowing 180 degrees opposite to where it had been when I took off, and I only realised the significance of that as I joined the circuit the wrong way and then saw the windsock, so I had to abandon my circuit and go across the airfield to come around the other way. It was as I did this that the instructor in the back snapped out of his trance and said: "what are you doing?" I recall snapping angrily at him (with probably a lot more swearing than I'm writing here): "oh, back with us are we, you f*****? Look at the goddam windsock". He shut up again lol.

I can recall turning onto finals with the wingtip not very high above some trees, just over the airfield's perimeter track. It was at that point that I saw two other aircraft which had also nearly been forced down by that same storm coming in for hasty landings. I subsequently learned the pilots had also had similar ideas about making a crash landing and were very keen to get down ASAP. Both aircraft were side by side on a straight in downwind approach to the field, straight toward my direction, as they too had assumed the incorrect landing direction, but were both too low to do anything about it by that point, so they kept on coming in. Fortunately they were widely spaced apart, and so I landed between them going the opposite way, as I passed one of them, I noticed that he was in such a hurry to get down on the ground, he'd forgotten to lower his landing gear, but the field was so wet from the storm that the aircraft was barely damaged by landing wheels up, other than a few grass stains on its belly, because it simply slid along the wet grass. A bunch of us actually picked the thing up off its belly and someone leaned in the cockpit and dropped the gear, and it was actually perfectly fine, believe it or not.

When my aeroplane came to a halt, I was absolutely fuming at that instructor, but for some reason which I've never really fathomed, I never said a word about it to anyone until many years later, when really I guess I should have reported him for having frozen up on me, at the very least. Instead I just sat there in silence and decided I'd never fly with him again, and he did everything he could to avoid me for the rest of the duration of my training.

Yup, thunderstorms are really best avoided if you can manage it.

[mwilk 1,104]

Chock, good to have you back. Great story. In aviation, if someone says, "we'll be fine", you probably won't be.

Not sure if you were referring to me, but yeah, it's 12:38 and starting to pour here. I live next to KDAL facing 13L and can barely see the runway lights.

 

OK...the other Dallas simmer will chime in here....

Guys...have you looked at OUR weather map recently (as of 12:15am)

 

We's about to get slammed by weather just like that! 

 

Batten down the hatches guys!

I missed all of that. I was sound asleep and never heard a thing.

[Steve Dra 7,573]

Not sure if you were referring to me, but yeah, it's 12:38 and starting to pour here. I live next to KDAL facing 13L and can barely see the runway lights.

I was actually referring to myself...as in "I'm the other Dallas simmer...I know Mike and Brian are"....Good to know you're in the neighborhood too!  

Hope you did ok last night...we got some high winds and it knocked out cable and the internet for a bit, but otherwise all is good here in Carrollton (near Jose and Keller Springs)

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

I was actually referring to myself...as in "I'm the other Dallas simmer...I know Mike and Brian are"....Good to know you're in the neighborhood too!  

Hope you did ok last night...we got some high winds and it knocked out cable and the internet for a bit, but otherwise all is good here in Carrollton (near Jose and Keller Springs)

Oh yeah, I forgot about Brian being in the area. I guess Mike, Brian, yourself and me are the main DWF guys that post here on Avsim a lot.

 

Fortunately it ending up not being that bad, aside from a lot of rain. Never lost power or any utilities, so we got off easy. Heard there were some tornados down south though and Houston got pounded.

[Steve Dra 7,573]

Oh yeah, I forgot about Brian being in the area. I guess Mike, Brian, yourself and me are the main DWF guys that post here on Avsim a lot.

 

Fortunately it ending up not being that bad, aside from a lot of rain. Never lost power or any utilities, so we got off easy. Heard there were some tornados down south though and Houston got pounded.

Well we're rolling into crazy weather season here in Dallas....We can have 80 degrees, epic rainfall and tornado's one week and 6 inches of snow the next week.

I'm thinking we may still get a snow event this season...even though it seems like we missed the bulk of winter, March has always dealt us some whacky weather.

[mwilk 1,104]

Well we're rolling into crazy weather season here in Dallas....We can have 80 degrees, epic rainfall and tornado's one week and 6 inches of snow the next week.

I'm thinking we may still get a snow event this season...even though it seems like we missed the bulk of winter, March has always dealt us some whacky weather.

This is usually our month for ice. I don't miss that at the airport.

[cmpbellsjc 2,960]

Well we're rolling into crazy weather season here in Dallas....We can have 80 degrees, epic rainfall and tornado's one week and 6 inches of snow the next week.

I'm thinking we may still get a snow event this season...even though it seems like we missed the bulk of winter, March has always dealt us some whacky weather.

Yeah this has been a weird winter. I've lived in Dallas since 2000 and don't ever remember a winter this warm. I golf a lot and it seems that every winter I'm freezing my butt off playing on Sunday mornings but this winter has not been bad at all. Heck, I've had to run my A/C in the house more than my heater this winter. But you never know, I think it was last March we got a few snow days.

[HighBypass 2,339]

Ruddy hell, Chock! Glad you were far enough along your advanced flying course to get both of you back safely! What a story. Thanks for sharing.