In this case, the forecast for conditions below the weather wasn’t all that bad, so I elected to go. Explaining a delay from a warm hotel room is far preferable to struggling with a load of ice in the hinterlands of Canada. True, I do sometimes get paid to deliver airplanes to the opposite side of the world, and clients expect their airplanes to arrive on time, but I have no reluctance to wait it out if the weather is marginal or downright unflyable. I’m certainly not the smartest chimp in the sky, but one reason I’ve survived 35 years of international delivery flying is that I try never to push the weather. Granted that I probably could, the next question was whether I should. Ceilings over the water figured to allow a reasonable margin.
The plan was to fly over the Atlantic abeam Portland, Maine, and track down the coast to Atlantic City, refuel, and reconsider my options. When I awoke on the 15th, I called weather for an update, then opted to take a look. The northern segment of the route was forecast for intermittent freezing conditions from the surface to 20,000 feet, but I reasoned that wouldn’t be the case at low level out over the water.īangor was still good VFR, however, well north of all the meteorological misery. A higher altitude wasn’t even worth considering, as winds would have effectively had me flying in place. The Columbia’s sophisticated, thermostatic climate-control system, so effective at combating the heat of the Southwest desert, couldn’t contend with the severe, cold temperatures several thousand feet above the frozen tundra, and the airplane’s oil temp wasn’t happy with them, either.Įqually bad, the flow at 6,000 feet was ferocious, pretty much on the nose at 40 knots. Trouble was, even if I thought I was ready for the cold, the airplane wasn’t. With a proper preheat, anything was possible. I had dealt with worse temperatures many times. Goose Bay was running about -30 degrees C when I launched from Bangor, Maine, on the second day of the trip. East Coast to Geneva, Switzerland, in March, during some of the coldest early-spring weather anyone could remember. The initial mission had been to fly a 2007 Columbia 400 from the U.S. What had begun as a simple, 4,500 nm, late-winter ferry flight in a capable airplane had deteriorated to an ignominious retreat. Bill Cox flew a Columbia 400 from Maine to North Carolina under low ceilings.