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Weather and Static Systems

Gemini Sparkle

Key Takeaways:

  • A cross-country flight was complicated by critical instrument failure (airspeed and altimeter), requiring a diversion and lengthy, logistically challenging repairs over a holiday weekend.
  • The return flight was similarly fraught with severe weather, including navigating a tropical storm and executing a go-around due to a wind shear alert from a thunderstorm directly over the destination airport.
  • The pilot's experiences underscored the immense value of competent maintenance, reliable remote support, functioning weather radar (Nexrad), helpful air traffic controllers, and sheer luck in ensuring aviation safety.
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“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.

FLYING Staff

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