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As the morning waned, the weather picture improved greatly, with only scattered showers and clouds over the Mojave Desert and clearing over the west side of the Tehachapi Mountains. We ended up filing to go over Victorville and into Bakersfield to visit family. Soon, we were cruising in VMC at 10,000 feet and looking at the activity over the Mojave. Ahead, there were Pireps for icing above 8000 feet, so we asked for and received routing over Edwards AFB at 6000. Based on what we saw visually and on the FAAs flight information system (FIS-B), we thought we were well out of danger.

Editorial Staff

Sunday, January 27, 2019 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

A pilot, despite navigating visually and relying on in-cockpit weather, was unexpectedly sucked into a severe thunderstorm with strong updrafts, heavy rain, and hail.
The incident highlighted the dangerous latency of the FIS-B Nexrad weather radar, which did not display the real-time severity of the rapidly developing storm cell.
This experience taught the pilot a crucial lesson about the unreliability of latent weather data, leading them to adopt a strict policy of maintaining a 20-mile buffer from any convective activity.

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I had passed my instrument rating checkride two weeks earlier, and my wife and I had flown to Palm Springs, Calif., for our anniversary. It was time to fly back to the San Francisco area, but the weather wasn’t cooperating. Severe rainstorms in the Los Angeles basin and thunderstorms over the Mojave Desert that morning meant we weren’t going anywhere soon.

The coastal route avoided convective activity, but likely would have us in constant rain and IMC the entire route, and limited our altitude due to potential icing above. The route over the western Mojave showed severe convective activity, but it was moving east.