Today was another ’travel to work" day. In the afternoon the sky in Barcelona started to become cloudy. When we were swimming around noon we had blue skies all over. So something was going on in the vicinity. And yes, that does looked just lovely. The good thing is that the grey areas can be overflown in the SR22TN going up at FL180 or a bit more.
The first dangerous beauty was sitting over the French-Spanish-Border.
Then I was getting closer to something interesting.
The mothership was hovering over me.
The colorful core was to my right.
The other one I was flying around earlier was the left and behind.
Slowly I was able to turn right towards my original course and destination around this one.
Now with all the drama over I was enjoying a smooth evening flight at FL200.
Then Swiss Radar told me to descend to FL130 “at 1500 fpm or greater”. So dialed it in and kicked the nose over.
All in all it was an uneventful flight and I’m happy to report that the SR22TN is a great tool to get you from A to B. But one can also see it has limits. CBs are powerful and grow awfully big. So in the end there may be cases where there is no way through.
Turning off radar layer can give you insight if something be overflown. Turning of infrared gives you better view on where actually cell is/was. Combining both pictures and previous conclusions should help in deciding on route and altitude.
Really impressive trips you report here.
From the Picts you show us, it seems that much lower than FL180/200 would have been enough to circumnavigate in VMC ?
For information, did you have stormscope onboard, and if yes, did it paint correctly the dangerous areas ?
That’s a great report, Stephan. A very good demo for the ADL.
Good job on using ADL. I had similar task few days ago when coming back from Paris and made pretty good job in avoiding cells but I missed the conclusion on icing in stratus clouds which happened at FL180 – next time I’ll count on this as well.
PetitCessnaVoyageur wrote:
From the Picts you show us, it seems that much lower than FL180/200 would have been enough to circumnavigate in VMC ?
Yes. At that point. Earlier I had to climb from FL180 to FL200 to get over other stuff in order to avoid the bad stuff visually.
PetitCessnaVoyageur wrote:
For information, did you have stormscope onboard, and if yes, did it paint correctly the dangerous areas ?
Yes, but it kept silent during this flight. It would have painted lightning strikes onto the map and there would also have been an aural warning like “lightning 10 o’clock”
PetitCessnaVoyageur wrote:
Really impressive trips you report here.
The most important message I wanted to convey is that there isn’t actually not much impressive about it. I do it twice a week as kind of a longer commute to work and back home. In most cases no airline would provide a similar service. If weather doesn’t permit a safe flight, I postpone or cancel or divert. Nothing bad happens, if I do. I fly about 30 hours a month on average as the result and it has a certain feeling of airline pilot to it. 
However, I’m not sure whether that’s actually a good thing. 
Well, I find your flights very impressive, and it’s cool that you get so much IR practice.
With my non-turbo SR22 I could not do the ones above FL180, but it was also a deliberate descision to not fly above FL200 (the NA can do FL200 although it’s restricted to 175 by POH) without a pressurized cabin. I am thinking about scenarios like a defective oxygen system or an engine failiure above bad weather/icing conditions, and I decided that I don’t want that.
But that’s not a judgement, just a personal decision. The way you do these flights seems perfectly safe to me, my decisisons are based on my ideas of a “perfectly safe plan B”. But maybe I’m too conservative here.
Flyer59 wrote:
With my non-turbo SR22 I could not do the ones above FL180, but it was also a deliberate descision to not fly above FL200 (the NA can do FL200 although it’s restricted to 175 by POH) without a pressurized cabin.
I prefer pressurization for comfort. For safety, I use two independent oxygen systems. Obviously the spare is kept ready for immediate use. I’m normally flying 2 POB so we each have our own system and the spare is the second output of the other system. That way, if an issue goes unnoticed, only one of us is at risk of losing consciousness. There is also the health aspect, I don’t like spending too much time above FL180 in an unpressurized cabin.
Interesting report, Stephan!
I’ve flown in similar weather and indeed the ADL is a very handy tool for finding your way through areas with weather. I don’t have onboard radar so need to stay visual when there are CB’s around.
Then Swiss Radar told me to descend to FL130 “at 1500 fpm or greater”. So dialed it in and kicked the nose over.
I got a similar request from Padova Radar when entering Italy over the Alps. I said “Unable” and got some headings instead.
For passenger comfort I always try to plan the descent with a 400-500fpm rate all the way down.
There must be an optimum (power setting / descent rate / IAS) to convert altitude into forward speed. I’ll start a separate thread on that…
