Race To The Airport

I got the telephone call all of us dread: My mother had just been hospitalized and wasn’t expected to live out the day. It came as I was in the middle of tackling some must-do, employment-related work from which I simply couldn’t walk away. By the time I finished, it was late in the day. The hospital was some 600 nm away, in a rural Southern town, albeit one with a well-equipped airport. After a quick call to Flight Service to check weather and file IFR, I was out the door. Soon, I was airborne, southeast-bound and headed into a typical summer evening, with pop-up thunderstorms in all quadrants. By the time I started letting down, my cockpit-mounted Nexrad display was painting a red splotch just beyond my destination.

Editorial Staff

Thursday, April 19, 2012 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Driven by a critical family emergency, the author embarked on a 600 nm flight into severe thunderstorm conditions.
Facing an imminent storm at his destination, and against ATC advice, he made the risky decision to cancel IFR and rush a landing to reach his mother faster.
Although he successfully landed just ahead of the storm and found his mother's condition improved, he recognized he had pushed boundaries and taken significant, potentially dangerous risks due to personal stress.

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After a quick call to Flight Service to check weather and file IFR, I was out the door. Soon, I was airborne, southeast-bound and headed into a typical summer evening, with pop-up thunderstorms in all quadrants. By the time I started letting down, my cockpit-mounted Nexrad display was painting a red splotch just beyond my destination. The controller suddenly was very busy rerouting traffic around the building storm while offering anything I wanted for a new destination.

Soon, I figured out the storm and I were going to arrive at the airport simultaneously. I decided to divert and dialed the controller’s vector into the autopilot. When I finally was able to look up and outside, I realized I was over my mother’s home and within sight of the destination airport. Lightning flashed just beyond it, but it was VFR. Diverting meant at least another 1.5 hours before I could get to the hospital.

Against the controller’s protestations, I cancelled IFR, pulled off the power, dropped the gear and dove for the runway. It was a race: Would I get to the runway before the storm?

I won. I could see the storm’s roll clouds off the far end of the runway as I landed. Only two large raindrops fell on the airplane before I could secure it and head into town. I easily made it to the hospital, where I learned my mother’s condition was much better than I had been told.

I pushed it very hard that night, breaking just about every rule I had ever set for myself, and ignored the FAA’s strong recommendations against flying with a personal event like death on my mind. It worked out, but it was a near thing, and easily could have gone the other way.

—Mike Davidson

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