Long ago and far away, I helped manage a four-plane flying club with its airplanes scattered around the major and minor airports surrounding our metropolitan area. It was winter, and we needed to move the club’s Piper Archer from Big City International to Suburban Regional for maintenance. Another club member and I met at the airplane.
I had a fresh instrument rating, which I earned flying the same airplane we needed to move. Both airports were familiar. It was an easy 15-mile hop. It was dark; that’s okay because I was night current and it would just be the pilot aboard, since one of us had to drive to the destination and pick up the other. And it was snowing.
There was no operational reason to not fly the hop. A look into the snowy night sky, and the limited visibility it offered, made me shudder even more than the cold weather alone. The snow was falling from a relatively high overcast. Visibility underneath it was reduced by the snow, but conditions remained decent VFR.
But I didn’t want to fly the airplane in that weather. To this day, I don’t know why, but it had a lot to do with flying through snow at night and the limited visibility I could expect. The white flakes rushing by the windshield. Looking up again at the snow falling from the relatively calm night sky, I just shook my head and told the other club member I was gonna pass on the flight and I would meet him at the destination. And that’s what we did. He reported an easy flight and no problem with visibility.
It can be stressful to you and others if you cancel a flight because you just don’t feel like flying under those conditions, but I really can’t think of a better reason. Sometimes we just have remember the old saying, “It’s better to be on the ground wishing we were in the air than it is to be in the air wishing we were on the ground.”
Have you encountered a situation or hazardous condition that yielded lessons on how to better manage the risks involved in flying? Do you have an experience to share with Aviation Safety’s readers about an occasion that taught you something significant about ways to conduct safer flight operations? If so, we want to hear about it.
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