From the “Better to be down here wishing you were up there” department…

I was supposed to fly to Ottawa this weekend. I had my favourite plane booked and everything.

Unfortunately, when I checked the weather forecast, it showed an AIRMET for the possibility of moderate mixed or rime ice in clouds along my entire route. The CIP icing profile at the NOAA Aviation Weather Center certainly supported that, especially right at the end of the lake. And the forecast for Ottawa called for strong winds gusting to 30 knots (although nothing I haven’t handled before, especially not in a fast beast like 8323Y), but the possibility of low ceilings (800 feet), rain, several layers of clouds, and a low freezing level. In my limited IFR experience, that seems like an approach where you’d pick up some ice on the way down, and then have to shoot a difficult ILS through rapidly changing wind conditions. That sounded like one of those “maybe I could do it, and maybe I couldn’t” – and I wouldn’t want to be there on the day I couldn’t. Once you got to the point where you knew you couldn’t make it, you’d have a load of ice and have to climb back up through the clouds (maybe picking up a bigger load) and find someplace without the low celings and maybe a long runway, which probably would have meant going back to Ogdensburg or Watertown.

Like we say in aviation, it’s better to be down here wishing you were up there, than to be up there and wishing you had a way to be down here. So I drove. And of course, on the 5 hour drive I encountered maybe 3 minutes of very light rain, but could see either clear skies or light cirrus almost the whole way. I could have made it if I’d flown, but I really didn’t have a way to be sure of that (or as sure as you can be in aviation) before hand, so I had to take the safe way out. I made the right decision based on the information I had – I just wish I’d had better information.