"Three things in life are overrated," I was told in medical school. "Home cooking, out of town sex and the Johns Hopkins Hospital." Envy was surely at work. When I became an intern in the great Midwest, the saying was similar, but regionalized. "Three things in life are overrated: (HC, OOTS) and the Mayo Clinic." I'm confident that similar aphorisms in the West disparaged Stanford or maybe UCLA. In any event, the message was about those overrated but highly regarded facts of life.
Labor Day weekend. The usual is planned: Tampa to Lebanon, New Hampshire, in our Cheyenne. The weather? Lousy in Florida (thunderstorms) and crummy in the Southeast (low ceilings and visibilities), improving towards the Northeast, but lowering in New Hampshire. It looks doable.
Off we don't go. As we taxi out, the airport is closed for thunderstorms. It is not yet noon, a bad sign. I open the oil cooler doors, expecting an indefinite hold, as it is hot, very hot. In time the aerodrome opens and we are cleared to take off to the south. I notice the Nexrad is "unavail." We go.
Without Nexrad, I negotiate a series of buildups, some visually, some by onboard radar. (Remember that? That used to be, before Nexrad, as good as it got.) At one point I ask for and receive an intermediate altitude of 15,000 feet. I can see low-hanging anvils everywhere; 15,000 seems very comfortable in the meantime.
Clear of the weather, I ask for FL 250, which is where the fun begins. Out of 200, the airspeed indicator on the pilot's side starts a slow slither towards zero. The altimeter jumps around, assessing our altitude in 500-foot jerks. What the devil? I look to the often ignored, never closely watched, copilot's instruments. They show a climb of 1,000 feet per minute and a gradually increasing altitude consistent with what I think we're doing. But staring at an airspeed indicator falling to zero is not a reassuring experience. Should we retreat to Tampa? I'm reluctant. We've just worked our way through this unpleasant weather.
The GPS altitude on the Garmin 430 is consistent with the copilot's gauges. JAX center agrees with our altitude when I think we're at Flight Level 230. I admit to a "static system partial problem" to the center. JAX voices no concern.
I decide to continue. The airplane is running normally; the encoder, the copilot's altimeter and the GPS agree about our altitude. The copilot's airspeed indicator seems about right. My wife is uneasy. How is it, she wonders, that we can be sure of our altitude as we transgress some of the busiest airspace on earth? Trust me, I say. Though, truth be told, I'm uneasy myself. I switch to the alternate static source, without any change in any instrument. Should I land? We'd be shipwrecked, somewhere, with a large Labrador Retriever. On we go.
As we approach the Northeast, I am deprived of the metars usually supplied by XM Weather. I have no reception on our Avidyne. Signal strength is "low," indicating that the box is working, but no adequate signal is being received. I call flight service over Virginia. I barely remember how. Raleigh radio replies. The weather at our destination is 2,000 overcast, three miles, rain and mist. The fact that Lebanon (KLEB) is in a nonradar environment reminds me that an ILS without radar supervision in mountainous terrain with an unreliable altimeter is the kind of thing Peter Garrison likes to write about in Aftermath. This concept enters my distracted, vaguely displeased mind. I decide to default to Manchester, New Hampshire. They have maintenance there, at Wiggins Airways, where I've had things done before, and they are reporting better weather (3,000 scattered, 4,000 overcast), at least according to the nice man at Flight Service. The terrain is more hospitable. We can rent a car there and get to Lebanon in an hour and a half.
We start down into a pretty thick overcast. Vectored onto the ILS 35, I note we're still IMC at 2,000 feet. So much for the forecast. But the ILS does bring a big bouquet of relief: I can receive a glideslope, great reassurance for a man with an altimeter staring him in the face that reads height in 700-foot gulps. I'm quite grateful when we break out with infinite runway before us. We'll sort out the maintenance tomorrow, a Saturday.
To my surprise and gratitude, Wiggins has weekend maintenance. I talk to John Danis at 9 a.m. and by 11:30 he calls me back, announcing that he's located both pitot tubes on the fuselage and recommends bringing the airplane into the hangar for a static leak check and a leak check of the air data computer. I'm very grateful for Saturday service. I also talk to Bill Turley, our airplane's constant gardener, and ask him, given his intimate knowledge, to talk directly to John at Wiggins.
