Christmas Eve 2002 should have been a happy time. It was my first Christmas with my new wife in our new home in Miami. I was a commercial pilot for a small, domestic freight airline. Pilots who do this type of flying are referred to as “freight dogs” because sometimes a day for us can seem like seven years. My normal duty day was 14 hours long, but this being Christmas Eve, I had a short day — just a quick trip to Tampa and back from Opa-locka Airport in Miami. Five hours’ total duty — nothing — piece of cake. I kissed my wife goodbye, told her not to peek at her presents, and off to the airport I went.
When I got there, what I saw on the weather radar dampened my Christmas cheer. Yet another cold front was making landfall across Florida. This one was slicing the state in half at a 45-degree angle from east to west, directly blocking my path to Tampa. The line of thunderstorms ahead of the front was so big that there was no way around; the cold front stretched out about 100 miles offshore into the Gulf of Mexico and all the way up to Canada. There was no way I was going to take the single-engine Cessna 210 I flew that far over the ocean at night. That left me with two options: I could cancel the flight and go home, or I could push on through and hope it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
