My husband and I were excited about our first cross-county trip from Florida to Maryland to visit family, with a few stops along the way. We were both fairly new pilots, my husband with less than two years experience and me with three, plus a recent IFR rating. I told my husband that although I am IFR rated, Im not comfortable in actual IMC for very long and I needed to build my confidence by going IFR in VFR conditions with intermittent IMC. Since he was not instrument-rated at the time, he agreed to my plan.
We awoke early, checked the weather and discovered a weak tropical disturbance was in the area resulting in scattered heavy rain showers with cumulus tops to 15,000 feet. We had just purchased a Garmin GPSMAP396 with XM NEXRAD radar and were confident in our ability to avoid extreme weather. Since all of the storms were west of our route, we agreed that we would be fine if we followed Floridas eastern coastline to St. Augustine for lunch, then onward to Myrtle Beach for a few nights of R&R.
We loaded up our Cessna 206 with luggage and our two sons, and filed our IFR flight plan. We filed Pompano to Palm Beach to V3, which is along the coast, to keep us away from the cells. I was relieved that we got our clearance as filed. After an uneventful takeoff we were handed over to a departure controller who
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