A guy I had flown on enough trips to turn him into a pretty good copilot called early one week in January to see if I could get a plane for the weekend.
I was flying out of Charlotte Douglas International Airport (KCLT) at the time. He wanted to bring a friend and pick up another friend at Dulles International Airport (KIAD), then we’d head to Somerset, Pennsylvania, to go skiing in the mountains beginning Friday night if we could get away in time.
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The weather looked perfect. A cold front was forecast to move through the Appalachians early Saturday, dropping a couple inches of snow where we would be skiing and then be off the coast late Saturday so as not to impact our Sunday flight back. I was late getting off work, and when I got to the FBO, the staff was all out for lunch but left the key and the Piper Arrow all gassed up for me. In the preflight I discovered the pitot heat was inoperative. If I waited for a mechanic to get back to see what the issue was, we would likely miss our reserved slot into Dulles. The need for pitot heat was nonexistent for the flight up and very unlikely for the flight back home, so I rationalized the concern away.
We had a great flight in clear weather and got in and out of Dulles with no delays and went skiing Friday night and again on Saturday on fresh snow. But instead of the front clearing out Saturday night, it turned stationary just east of us early Sunday. When I checked in with flight service Sunday morning, it was only shooting CAT IIs at Dulles and was not forecasting improvement for another six hours. My planned route along the spine of the Appalachians had great weather on the west side of the mountains, but ceilings and visibility were at or below IFR minimums on the east.
We put the Dulles passenger on a bus, and I filed a route that added some time to the trip but kept us over reasonable ceilings and visibility all the way to Charlotte. Along the way controllers offered several times for a more direct route, but I was not in a hurry, as I wanted the better weather as a hedge should we have to set down somewhere en route.
We were in clear skies above a solid cloud deck for a couple of hours, but flight service advised that the front was building along the southern end of our route, so I ducked into Tri-Cities Airport (KTRI) in Blountville, Tennessee, to get an in-person briefing with the FSS there and topped off the fuel tanks as a precaution. There were no reports of icing so far. The briefer noted how hard it is to forecast ice. I said I would give a PIREP when we got up to our cruising altitude of 7,000 feet.
The cloud deck had dropped and instead of being on top at 4,500 as we were coming in, we were still solid at 5,000 and at our planned altitude of 7,000. I love flying in a cloud deck if the chop is reasonable as there is not much to do but keep up a good instrument scan, but in this case the airspeed indicator was getting my attention starting with a little wiggle then a bigger wiggle then failure. Despite knowing exactly what was going on, I was amazed at how strong the urge was to push the nose down. I had what felt like a golf ball rising up in my throat.
As if I did not have enough to distract me, the boomerang-shaped UHF antenna on the cabin roof began to shimmy. A heavier vibration from the prop joined the chorus. I told my passengers that the vibrations were a result of us picking up a little ice and that it was not a big deal, but we were going to head back to Tri-Cities to recheck the weather. The center frequency was jammed with Piedmont and Delta flights, and I mentally rehearsed what I was going to say.
I got my private certificate at Carpenter Airport near Charlotte in the early 1970s, then moved to one of the FBOs at KCLT to get my commercial and instrument ratings. On a quiet night I asked one of the controllers what one thing he would want private pilots to improve on. He immediately said that he wished that they would rehearse what they were going to say before they keyed the mic, then added, “If you have a problem, just say, I got a problem.”
So when there was a break on the radio, I said, “Atlanta center, Cherokee 106, I have a problem.” I got a quick “Cherokee 106, go ahead” response and told the controller that I had picked up a heavy vibration in the aircraft, likely from icing, and was requesting immediate vectors back to Tri-Cities. He quickly gave me a heading, and I started a very gradual 180 back to Tri-Cities. About midway through the turn, it seemed that all the radio chatter appeared to have stopped. I could understand if the UHF antenna decided to jump ship, but I did not think VHF would be affected by icing. Thirty seconds before, I was praying for a pause in the traffic, and now I needed to hear something. Slowly the chatter picked back up, and thankfully the heavier of the prop vibrations eased up.
Over the next several minutes it seemed as if most of the radio traffic consisted of the controller assigning everyone off my frequency. I had no idea whether this was to give me a little breathing room, but it reinforced that I was not up there by myself.
A few minutes and altitude changes later, on a now very quiet frequency, Atlanta center asked if my situation had changed. I responded that it was about the same. Less than a minute later, center asked if I wanted to declare an emergency. I said, “Not at this time.” Had I been coming into a field with any sort of traffic, I would have said yes, but based on radio traffic I was the only one up tonight, and declaring an emergency was not going to help with what I was dealing with.
Atlanta center passed me off to Tri-Cities approach, which cleared me for the localizer approach to Runway 5. I responded that I was requesting a radar approach. All the controller said was “please repeat, radar approach?” But what I was imagining was this: “You want what? We stopped doing those years ago.” But I repeated “Radar approach.”
We popped out of the overcast well above minimums, and there was the airport looking like a jewel nestled up against the black of the mountains. I let approach know we had the field in sight, and the tower cleared me to land. I came in high, and with 7,000 feet of runway to play with, would wait until I had the landing made before I dropped flaps and the gear. When I told the tower that I was going to land long, the response in what almost sounded like a chuckle was “the runway is all yours.”
I was coming in hot and expected some float when I leveled off, but the Arrow settled quickly and firmly on the runway. I gingerly applied the brakes, and for whatever reason things got a little squirrelly. I kicked the Arrow straight about the time the tower said, “Right turn when able.” I told the tower we would be rolling on to the end.
As we taxied to the ramp I told my friend that we were here for the night and to find a motel nearby to come pick us up but to make sure that it had a bar. To which my new copilot announced that the drinks were on him.
When we piled out of the Arrow, I was underwhelmed by the ice. It looked like heavy frost on the leading edges, pitot, and UHF antenna, not that I would take off with that—but still. As my buddies headed over to get us a room, I went over to the flight service station next door trying to decide what I was going to say. “I ran into some ice, and it scared the hell out of me” just didn’t seem appropriate.
The guy who had briefed me earlier walked up, handed me a piece of paper, and said, “What do you think?” The paper was a PIREP, from me, stating that I had run into moderate to heavy icing at the location where I had notified Atlanta center.
I told the briefer that it was perfect. I walked out the next morning to mostly clear blue skies and a mostly empty ramp. Other than the Arrow, there was only a Piper Navajo with a full set of deicing boots. I had no idea as to when he had come in but was confident he had no problems with icing.
I had just completed my preflight when the Navajo pilot walked out to start his. I asked if he had come in last night. He said he had, and when I asked him if he had run into any ice, he stopped what he was doing and gave me a hard stare for a couple of seconds then said that this was not their destination. They had to divert to Tri-Cities because they ran into ice they could not handle.
That golf ball I thought I left behind me last night made a strong reappearance in my throat.
This column first appeared in the May Issue 958 of the FLYING print edition.
