I Learned About Flying From That: Riding the Wave

Clyde Davis

Monday, August 11, 2014 at 09:34 PM ET

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Key Takeaways:

An initial business flight from New Mexico to Colorado unexpectedly encountered an extremely violent mountain wave, subjecting the aircraft and passengers to severe, unforecast turbulence, rapid altitude changes, and extreme G-forces for nearly 125 nautical miles.
This harrowing experience highlighted the unpredictable and dangerous nature of mountain weather, leaving both the pilot and passengers significantly shaken despite a prior favorable weather briefing.
Years later, the pilot, recognizing a similar "pilot/control interface sensation" and receiving adverse ride reports at the same problematic location, prudently decided to turn back and land, avoiding a potentially dangerous repeat of the prior incident.
The incident underscored the critical importance of trusting pilot intuition and applying lessons learned from past harrowing events to make safety-first decisions in challenging flight conditions.

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Two business associates and I were on the second leg of a three-leg business trip that would carry us from Chino, California, to Las Cruces, New Mexico, to Boulder, Colorado, and then back home. The first leg was one I had made on numerous occasions because my company had several customers in the New Mexico area. To this day I can mentally recite all the navigational aids and waypoints (in order) to get to Las Cruces, El Paso, Texas, or Alamogordo, New Mexico. On an afternoon in late January 2000, after a couple of days of business meetings at White Sands Missile Range, we returned to the Las Cruces International Airport (KLRU). The weather that day at KLRU was beautiful, not a cloud in sight. A telephone weather briefing for our approximately 500 nm trip raised no concerns — clear with moderate winds aloft. There were no forecast weather problems between Las Cruces and Jeffco — the Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport (KBJC) in Denver, our destination. When transitioning a busy traffic area such as Denver I usually file IFR, so after lunch and a thorough preflight we departed, having filed for 11,000 feet.

Based on what we could see and buoyed by the favorable weather briefing, we anticipated an uneventful trip. We sat back to enjoy the spectacular New Mexico scenery as we headed north toward Socorro. The first indication of what lay ahead occurred as we turned northeast to cross the Sandia Mountains just south of Albuquerque. We’ve probably all experienced that moment in flight when the airplane takes on a different feel. We can’t explain why and we can’t pinpoint the reason, but the pilot/control interface gives a strange sensation. When this moment occurred for us, I told my passengers to buckle up tight as I expected we were in for a special ride.