Just after noon on a June day in 2012, a Pilatus PC-12 took off from Fort Pierce, in the middle of Florida’s Atlantic coast, bound for Junction City, Kansas. The pilot, his wife and their four young children were aboard, returning from a vacation in the Bahamas. Less than a minute later, the pilot engaged the autopilot and asked the Miami Center controller the identifier for Lakeland, the first fix along his route.
The first controller handed the flight off to a second, who cleared the airplane to climb to FL 230 and advised of an area of heavy rain ahead and slightly to the right. The pilot acknowledged and then, after a delay of several seconds, asked, “Do we have a vector to go around it? Is it … do we need to circumnavigate the weather?”
