One of our favorite guests, DPE Pat Brown, joins us again to talk about weather and more!
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00:01
Behind the Prop Intro
Clear prop SR73 Cherokee number two following. Twin traffic three mile final one trolley. Bravo makesford in Runway two five going four mile.
00:10
Nick Alan
This is behind the prop with United Flight Systems owner and licensed pilot Bobby Doss and his co host, major airline captain and designated pilot examiner Wally Mulhern. Now let's go behind the prop.
00:25
Bobby Doss
What's up Wally?
00:26
Wally Mulhern
Hey Bobby, how are you?
00:27
Bobby Doss
I'm fantastic as always. This week we're tackling something that I hear a lot about around the flight school. We've had a lot of it in the last couple of months in Houston, Texas. We're going to talk weather and we're going to share some resources, some stories and some information that's going to help you. Pat Brown joins us again on the show. Welcome, Pat.
00:46
Pat Brown
Thanks. Hey Bobby. Hey Wally.
00:48
Bobby Doss
So Pat and Wally did their recurrent DPE training today and they feel renewed and refreshed.
00:55
Pat Brown
They said it was the most worn.
00:56
Bobby Doss
Out, exciting day of their life and we'll leave it at that. But Wally, we talk, man. And I was joking on them. It's the prettiest day ever in Houston, Texas and we haven't had any luck for checkrides in the last six weeks. I think every day we've done a check ride with these two guys. We've had bad weather and here they have recurrent training, no check rides and the weather is clear to 1 million and not a lick of wind out there today.
01:23
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, I know for a fact there were a couple of other the Houston DPs who were in the class today. And as I was driving in, I was thinking, well, there's about eight lost checkrides today, easy. We're all, we're all on a zoom call.
01:36
Bobby Doss
Yeah, that's disappointing. You would almost wish that the FAA could get that right and only schedule that on a bad weather day. But boy, we nailed it for a good weather day. Pat, I've heard your name a million times right before after the word weather because I think people on check rides with you have struggled or stumbled and they call Pat the weatherman the weather. I think there's obviously a lot of weather we deal with in aviation and I don't remember where exactly I became fond or knowledgeable about the weather, but I have an app called Windy on my home screen. I look at Wendy every day. I know what the pressures are going to be. I always know the direction of the wind coming.
02:21
Bobby Doss
Looking at y' all scheduled check rides, I'm looking at weather days in advance, but somewhere private solo Cross country. I started getting a little smart. But I remember feeling like a pilot somewhere in my instrument days where I started coming to the flight school and I stopped asking, are we going to fly today? And I started saying, we are going to fly today, or I would say we're not going to fly today. I was making that weather call and I think we talk a lot about it, Wally, where people don't have that sense of decision making very much in training because the instructor is always doing it right. Just talk weather in general. What, what do we. The ACS calls out some specific things that people must know as they're private applicants. What are those things that we need to know as private applicants?
03:12
Pat Brown
Well, I've got the ACs in front.
03:14
Wally Mulhern
Sure.
03:14
Pat Brown
So, you know, we might as well talk about that. If you look at the knowledge elements, there's, I don't know, 10 or 12 of them, I guess, sources of weather data like the National Weather Service, acceptable weather products, meteorology applicable to the departure en route, alternate and destinations under VFR conditions, atmospheric composition and stability, wind, temperature, moisture, precipitation, weather systems, clouds, turbulence, thunderstorms and microbursts, icing and freezing levels, fog, mist, frost, obstructions to visibility and flight deck displays of digital weather and aeronautical information. This is all information in the knowledge area of the ACS for a private pilot applicant. For a private pilot applicant. And you know, as probably anybody that listens to this knows or will learn at some point, we're supposed to test at least one element in the knowledge list, one element in the risk list, and all of the skills.
04:18
Pat Brown
And so one kind of, I guess, leads to another. If I ask somebody about a temperature and dew point issue and they stumble on that. Well, I've kind of need to ask maybe something a little bit more. And. And I guess I have kind of gotten the reputation at least about being the guy that, you know, that hones in on weather. But there are a couple of DPs that I know that weight and balance is a big deal.
04:43
Wally Mulhern
Sure.
04:43
Pat Brown
And so I think all of us have, you know, your thing, little things that we think are kind of important. Wally. I don't know what yours are.
04:50
Bobby Doss
Electrical systems.
04:52
Wally Mulhern
Oh, yeah.
04:52
Pat Brown
Oh, oh, you're Mr. Electrical System.
04:55
Wally Mulhern
Yeah. Yeah.
04:56
Pat Brown
So, yeah. But I guess I have tended to hone in a little bit more on this is because that's what we're flying in. You know, we're flying in this ocean of air where we have currents just like we have in the ocean. And, but unlike the ocean, this stuff can change at the snap of a finger. You know, let's say that we have a close temperature in dew point. Let's say they're right on top of each other. It could be clear and beautiful outside just like it is right now. And just because the temperature and dewpoint is right on top of each other doesn't mean there will be fog out there. What it means is there is potential for fog. And all it takes is one little trigger of something and all of a sudden, boom. Your ceilings are down on the ground.
05:43
Bobby Doss
We've all been around in the mornings at this time of year, specifically where it's crystal clear outside. You're drinking your first cup of coffee, you turn around, check what's on the tv, the news, the whatever newspaper, you turn around, look outside, and it's just, it's like fog everywhere. Yeah, right. That's, that's that moment in time where the temperature and the dew point cam together. And that layer is just immense everywhere. And I think a lot of students, we have a pretty strong temperature dew point spread for solos. And it's not just visibility, it's also carb ice. They don't understand that those two things create the relative humidity number in the air. And to be honest, I didn't know that either back when I was a brand new pilot. But those two things create the potential for a lot of bad.
06:30
Pat Brown
If you do a Google search on carburetor ice, there's a really cool chart and colorful type of a chart and I think most pilots would be amazed at the wide temperature variation from high to low where you can get carb ice.
06:51
Bobby Doss
Oh, no question.
06:52
Pat Brown
At a temperature you wouldn't think you would get carb ice. But if you have the right temperature and humidity combination, almost regardless of what the temperature is, you can get carb ice.
07:05
Bobby Doss
Yeah, and that's a very dangerous thing. And our temperature dew point spread is more about carbides than it is visibility. But I've flown before where the temperature dew point spread on the ground was about 4 degrees Celsius. And then we're flying at about 2,000ft and you almost feel like you're in the clouds because you're looking through a hundred miles of it. You're now from the ground, you're only looking through 50ft of it and it looks like the skies are still pretty clear. But that's a, that would be a scary proposition if I was a student pilot flying in that kind of weather as well. So pretty much the ACS says you need to know everything there is about weather and that's tough. I can remember struggling with metars and tasks and the breaking it down.
07:45
Bobby Doss
I think students just need to study that stuff and know it right. You need to be able to read it. Sure, there's a million ways to get it interpreted or broken out for you. Foreflight is both the enemy of good and bad nowadays. I think everything reads in plain English, which is helpful, but I think you should still know those fundamentals. What are we talking about in yalls? Real world scenarios that they need to understand all the stuff that's in a METAR and a taf. And then more importantly, we talk TAF all the time, Pat, when we're trying to talk checkrides, because we know that's really going to be accurate. And this airport doesn't have a taf. And when someone tells me, well, you can't use that taf, I mean, come on, we're like three miles outside.
08:30
Bobby Doss
I'm pretty sure the forecast is going to be exactly the same. But what are y' all expecting people to know, applicants to understand as it relates to the metars and TAFs and all the rules and boundaries of those things?
08:41
Wally Mulhern
Well, I apply it to the cross country that I give them. So we're going to go from airport A to airport B and I ask how is the weather for our flight today? Could we make the flight? And you know, it's either yes, no or a maybe. And then we'll start talking about what the weather is at our departure airport, you know, how is it. We'll start, we'll look at the weather at the arrival airport, the destination airport, and then we'll start looking in between and you know, if you look at the big picture weather charts, you can get a pretty good idea of what the weather is. You know, if you know where the frontal activity is, that sort of stuff you'll have a fairly good idea of.
09:33
Wally Mulhern
You know, if the weather here is good and the weather at your destination is good, that's 150 miles away and there's no real frontal activity, probably the weather in between is going to be pretty good. And so then I will, I'll say, okay, let's say we're flying along and we have to use the restroom. Both of us have to use the restroom really bad. So we're going to divert. So we'll, I will then give them an airport about halfway between here and our destination. And I'll say, okay, let's Concentrate on there, that airport. Let's take a look at the weather there. You know, let's take a look at the winds. What Runway would we expect to use? I like to pick an uncontrolled airport where they would have to pick the Runway and you know, well, then we'll start talking about crosswinds.
10:23
Wally Mulhern
So I, I try to kind of incorporate it all together. But the other thing I like to do is I like to ask, how's the weather outside? And I like to see where their eyes go. Especially well if I'm in a room that has a window because I like them to look outside and you know, they can look outside. Well, it looks pretty good. Okay. Yeah, it does. Well, let's dive deeper. Just like someone who comes up to me and says, how are you feeling? I could say I feel good. I don't need to take my blood pressure, take my pulse, check my temperature to tell you how I'm feeling. I know how I'm feeling. So, you know, kind of apply that to the weather.
11:01
Wally Mulhern
Gee, when I walked in this morning, man, it was windy or boy it was cold or you know, it was really foggy on the road today. Well, it's probably foggy on the Runway then.
11:15
Bobby Doss
Yeah. So I've also had those days. I wear shorts almost every day to work because I like to wear shorts. I've come here when it was 60 degrees and then I left and I was freezing my tail off. Right. Like I wish I had a coat. And that's me just not planning. Of course that information was known. Everyone probably was predicting that. That's not a surprise. I do think as a kid though, I probably thought, where did this come from?
11:39
Wally Mulhern
Right.
11:39
Bobby Doss
But nowadays we know it's coming, right? How in your conversations, Pat, with applicants, do you incorporate these weather questions or how do you get that ball going?
11:50
Pat Brown
It's somewhat similar to what Wally does, but you know, we're two different people, we do things slightly differently. I'll typically ask kind of an open ended question, say, how did you determine that the weather was suitable for the flight today or unsuitable? And I would say eight times out of 10, the first answer will be, well, I checked the metars and the TAFs. Okay, what else? I looked on foreflight. Okay, what did you find on foreflight? Well, it, I got the metars and the TAFs. So where do the metars and the taps come from? Airports. Okay, well how about all these pretty pictures that Foreflight puts Up there. Where do they get that information? Airports. You know, I'm hoping they'll say the National Weather Service, because that's where it all comes from. Eventually through Leidos with foreflight.
12:48
Pat Brown
But, but ultimately it all comes from National Weather Service. And, and so finally I'll say, okay, well, you know, you've told me you look at the metar, you look at the taf, and sometimes they say I call flight service. Sometimes they'll say I looked in foreflight and you know, this is what I got, the charts and stuff. And I'll say, okay, well that's great. So mechanically you're telling what you did, which is great, but there's a tremendous amount of information there. How did you use that information? What is your process by which you determined that we can make this flight today? Not just I checked the taf, I checked the metars, I looked at the pretty pictures on foreflight. But how did you use that information? What are those pretty pictures on foreflight telling you?
13:36
Pat Brown
All the 20 different pages of weather briefings or whatever it is on foreflight that you can get. What is all that telling you and how can you use that to formulate a good go, no go decision? And that for me, that will typically lead to pulling out a kind of a generic surface analysis chart and kind of just drawing a line on it from point A to point B, which invariably will take us through a couple of different fronts or weather systems and then kind of, well, you know, we're crossing this boundary here. What is that? And oh, that's a low pressure front that does no such thing. It's a warm front in this particular case, or it's a high pressure front. Again, no such thing. So I find a couple of things.
14:24
Pat Brown
I find that the understanding of just basic symbology on a simple surface analysis chart is lacking.
14:35
Bobby Doss
And you're not talking like every little icon, you're just talking big picture here.
14:39
Pat Brown
Yeah, I'm talking about big picture. If somebody walks into one of my checkrides and can tell me, and again, I'm talking about broad strokes, generally speaking, what are the characteristics? Well, first of all, what is that front? That's a warm front. Tell me kind of some of the characteristics of a warm front and what kind of flying condition we could expect if were to encounter one. So if they can tell me that and the same thing with a cold front and maybe an occluded front and a stationary front and tell me some of the characteristics of those big Hs that you see on the map and the Ls and troughs, the little dashed lines or troughs. And occasionally you'll see a dry line.
15:22
Pat Brown
If I see a dry line on a surface analysis chart, I'm looking it out, I'll circle that and say, what do you think that is? But I think were talking before you hit the record button. I think there's only maybe eight symbols or something that generally will appear on a surface analysis chart. Highs, lows, the very the various fronts, a trough, the dry line, six or eight items. And if you can just kind of tell me the general characteristics of those things, I might say, depending on the surface analysis chart I'm looking at, if there's something obvious, I might say, where do you think the strongest winds are? Well, if they know that the stronger winds are typically with the isobars are close together and they can go all right there where those isobars are.
16:11
Pat Brown
For the most part, my questioning on weather is over. I do want them to be able to decode a METAR and a taf, not look at it plain language. And I'll tell you the reason why, besides the fact that frankly, it's easier to do that if you get pretty good at it. It's really just easier to do. But depending on what flight planner you're looking at, and personally, I like 1800WXBrief.com as a flight planner because if you put your route in there and hit submit, you get a split screen on the right hand side you get your route with, you know, greens, reds or blue or purple dots or whatever. And of course green is good, you know, red is bad, magenta is worse.
16:53
Pat Brown
But on the left side of the screen, if you choose Metars, all these metars along the route line up and because of the way they're formatted, all the temperature and dew points generally line up. And literally at the snap of a finger you can tell that at least right now the it's either stable or it's converging or it's diverging or you know what the spread is with what you can tell what the cloud deck is likely to be at just by looking at the temperature and dew point spread. Same thing with Taft. If you click on forecast and taf, you get that split screen. And again, because the format is the same oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes the sky conditions, sky clear, overcast, this or that, are all right there lined up.
17:35
Pat Brown
And again just with the snap of a finger, you can discern right now what the trend is for the next four, five, six hours, whatever the case may before the next half comes out. So knowing how to read coded weather for me is awfully important.
17:51
Bobby Doss
Yeah, I can't disagree. I'm with you. I think maybe I don't know every acronym that could be at the latter.
17:58
Pat Brown
Half of that, but you don't have to.
17:59
Bobby Doss
But I can definitely tell you the winds, the direction, the, what the ceiling probably is and what I expect to be, the daylight. And I joke, Wendy. Similarly, I can glance at the chart on Wendy and it's a color bar and a wind sock and some numbers. Right. But I can tell you whether we're going to be a busy day or not a busy day just by that quick glance because. And that's the same thing I think you're saying about being able to decode that stuff. You're able to really depict whether you should go or shouldn't go. Or maybe I need to think about this one a little bit more, too.
18:33
Pat Brown
Well, and before you hit record, Wally, you were talking about the, you know, especially the weather that you, where you live.
18:41
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, yeah. You know, I, I, I, you know, we live in Houston. We live in a sort of inland coastal community. I don't know what are we 70 miles from the, the Gulf of Mexico. But, you know, the prevailing winds around here are from the south. And I know just, I know walking out of my house, if it feels unseasonably seasonably cool, whether it's wintertime or July, it doesn't matter. But if it just feels cooler than it normally is, I know the winds are probably out of the north. And I know whatever airport I'm going to, we're going to be taking off and landing north, which it's a little bit of an eye roller because just because the way the airports are configured around here that things flow a lot better if we're landing south.
19:35
Bobby Doss
I was going to say you're already frustrated. It's going to be a longer day because you're going to have to fly other places to shoot approaches.
19:41
Wally Mulhern
But I'm already thinking, as I'm driving here, I'm thinking, okay, this is an instrument checkride. I need to get that ILS in. If this is a non was airplane, I'm going to have to go to College Station to get that ils. And it's a was airplane. I can, I can do a gps. But, you know, I'm thinking along those lines. I remember taking a weather class in college and basically the first Half of the semester is kind of on theory. The second half of the semester was reading all the charts and reading, you know, the metars. And they weren't called metars back then, but it was the same thing my sequence reports. Yeah, yeah. I was trying to remember what it was called, but it's been.
20:20
Pat Brown
We're from the same era.
20:22
Wally Mulhern
Right, right. But I remember sitting there thinking, let's just get to the charts. I don't need to know this theory stuff. But now I realize how much I use it. You know, just unseasonably cold in Houston. Probably the winds are out of the north. You know, it's probably going to be high ceilings, probably the air is not moist, but you know, it's just things like that. I think it's important to know your local weather, what it's like if you live up on the Great Lakes, probably if the wind is coming from one of the lakes, it's probably bad weather. Yep. I don't know, but I'm just guessing.
21:07
Pat Brown
Well, you know, down here, let's just pick a month. July, you know, you walk outside and the air is so thick you wear it.
21:15
Wally Mulhern
Yeah.
21:15
Pat Brown
And you can just be absolutely certain or pretty darn certain that by about 3 o' clock in the afternoon we're gonna have a thunderstorm.
21:21
Bobby Doss
No question.
21:22
Pat Brown
If you're living In Florida at 3 o' clock every afternoon, you are going to have a thunder storm.
21:28
Bobby Doss
Fly around the towers of showers around here in the month of June and July as well. Right. Because it's just, it's pockets of it, but it gets together and dumps the water out.
21:38
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, I did some. Spent some time out on Guam and I know a standard day in Guam was partly cloudy skies, wind 060 at 15, gusting to 25. Temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit. If it was raining, it was 85. If it was not raining and it was the standard altimeter, 3030, that was just what it is.
22:01
Bobby Doss
That's pretty good weather. Yeah, I like Guam. So we talked acs. What other resources would you point people to? There used to be a whole bunch of ACs or AC circulars, advisory circulars were going to talk about, but those have all kind of formulated into the aviation handbook. We've talked about some cool handbooks on this show, but there's an entire book dedicated to all this. I can remember talking to my instructor. He wanted a weather book and he couldn't afford it or something, I don't remember. But I bought this weather book for him and I'm like, are you gonna read that or skim that? He's like, I'm gonna read it. And I was like, man, that doesn't seem very enjoyable. He's a professional captain somewhere today and I'm not.
22:42
Bobby Doss
But I do think that there's a big aspect of figuring out how you like to learn and learning. What are some of the resources y' all would point people to, if anything that I haven't mentioned.
22:54
Wally Mulhern
I, you know, I think everybody does, you know, learn a little bit differently. But there are so many resources out there. I, I wouldn't even begin to know what to point people at. You know, so much of, you know, the old days of watching the weatherman on the 10 o' clock news, I think are, are long gone.
23:18
Bobby Doss
But if people don't know it, that's just an actor saying whatever they've been told to say. There's maybe a little bit of meteorology in there, but if they ever did a day where it wasn't like going to be bad weather, I'd be shocked. Right. Even on clear days you would think that the weather's going to be bad.
23:33
Pat Brown
You know, I understand that, but I would differ with you just a little bit on that, Wally. And I would say start watching the weather at night, maybe pull up a surface analysis chart on your own from the weather service, National Weather Service.
23:50
Bobby Doss
That's good advice there.
23:51
Pat Brown
And just have it right there in front of you and see if you can guess what it is the weather person is going to say about the weather around the country today. I think when you, if you just start with something like that, I mean, frankly, when I'm planning we're going to sun Nathan in a couple of weeks, about a week in advance, I'm going to start watching the news, the Weather Channel a little bit more than I do right now. I just want to get a kind of an idea of a bigger picture and then I'm going to go to, then I'm just going to go to weather.com and I'm just going to start picking out the 10 day forecast and picking about four or five points along our way and see what the 10 day is.
24:32
Pat Brown
And of course the closer you get to the actual day, the more accurate it tends to be. So when I'm three days out, I'll still look at the 10 day weather because it's you know, it's all relative. Okay, well, this is not too bad. And then as we get about two days out, I'll look at the moss, various places because that goes out three days. TAFs don't. And, and oftentimes the moss is pretty accurate. I won't bet my life on it, but it oftentimes it's reasonably accurate. Of course, the day before, now I'm gonna, I'm, now I'm starting to look at the progs maybe and certainly the TAFs, and probably night before I'll actually call a briefer, but that's kind of. But I start with just the regular TV weather person and look, see what that big picture is.
25:18
Bobby Doss
Yeah, I like to additional resources doing that. I think I can remember again as I matured in my weather knowledge, never knowing that they really talked about the temperature dew point on every daily forecast. But there's so much information, especially here, as humid as it gets. How much information is in that? Those two pieces of information.
25:38
Wally Mulhern
All right, I'll tell just a funny story about a local weather guy. We used to have a weatherman here in Houston named Neil Frank.
25:47
Pat Brown
Oh, yeah.
25:47
Wally Mulhern
And Neil was at one point he was the director of the National Hurricane center down in Florida, and he came to Houston and was the weatherman for the CBS affiliate here in Houston. And he was really a bit of a folk hero here in Houston. I mean, he had this signature crew cut and he was, he was a star in Houston, Texas. But anyway, I was walking through the airport one day with another pilot, and I don't remember we were going. But I saw Neil walking through the airport, Neil Frank. And I, I pointed out to the guy I was flying with, his name is Bill Bella. If he happens to listen, I say, bill, isn't that Neil Frank? And he goes, yeah, it is. Well, well, let me back up.
26:29
Wally Mulhern
At the time we used to go to this room that we called the weather room to get our flight plan and basically get our weather. And then we'd go to the airplane. Anyway, so I said, bill, isn't that Neil Frank over there? And he goes, yeah. And he yells across the airport, he goes, hey, Neil. And Neil looked over at us and Bill goes, how's the weather? And, and Neil gave us a thumbs up. And Bill said to me, well, we don't need to go to the weather room. Let's just go straight to the airplane.
27:01
Bobby Doss
If Neil Frank says it's good, it's gonna be good.
27:03
Wally Mulhern
Yeah, yeah.
27:04
Bobby Doss
So let's talk the flip side of that. Let's talk, tell a couple stories as we wrap up. Bad weather stories, maybe good weather stories. Flying our weather stories. I told y' all right before I hit record. I don't think my wife will ever fly with me again in imc because we did an Austin trip one night to go see our daughter. And it was cloudy and it was probably more broken, but were in and out of the clouds at about 6,000ft. Pitch black outside, you couldn't see it coming, but when it got there, you could feel the bumping. And I had the strobe lights on, and it felt like were in the extra. The. The Exorcist TV show where there was somebody on the plane wing. But I was a mistake, probably on my part to let her experience that way.
27:46
Bobby Doss
What, what's some of your. What's the story that sticks with you, that makes you think about the weather? Wally?
27:52
Wally Mulhern
Well, I. I think every time that I can honestly say I've been scared in an airplane, weather has been a factor, whether it be thunderstorm, flying freight at night. And we had a mentality of, well, we got weather radar, we can go. And that was kind of. Kind of the young, cocky attitude that we freight pilots had. And I just. I'll never forget flying one night from Monroe to Dallas Fort Worth and going through the weather, and a lot of times people would go with me, and this night, nobody went with me. And I truly remember thinking it was a blessing that nobody was with me because it would be a shame for two people to die, because I really thought that there was a really good chance that I wasn't going to make it through.
28:47
Wally Mulhern
And then on top of that, this just shows you how stupid I was. I landed and I got back in, I flew back through it. It wasn't as bad on the way back, but on the way back I'm thinking, oh, my gosh, you're just a total idiot here. But, yeah, I remember that night, and I just remember there were a couple times where, you know, ceilings were lower than they were supposed to be. When I say supposed to be lower than forecast and coming in and, you know, you're expecting to pop out of the clouds at 900ft, and you don't, and they are 700ft, 600, 500. And, you know, I can remember the blood pressure going up.
29:32
Bobby Doss
Yeah.
29:32
Wally Mulhern
And it's. It's not a good feeling.
29:34
Bobby Doss
Pat, do you have a weather story that sticks with you?
29:37
Pat Brown
You know, the one that you know, talking about what you taught reminded me of one. But before were hit record, I had said something about a different one. So I'll tell you the one this is. I hadn't been instructing, I don't know, probably three or four years. So fairly green. And were flying back VFR day, flying back from Brenham. And for those that don't know, Brenham is about 45 miles west, a little bit north of where we are right now in the hill country. And I was with a student, private pilot student, if I remember right. Anyway, he had gotten a briefing and there were thunderstorms about halfway between Beaumont and Houston. So that would put them about. I don't know, what would you say, Wally? Probably 80 miles from Brenham, something like that, somewhere like that.
30:31
Pat Brown
And you know, they had been blowing up all day long and they were dissipating at that point. And that was what he told the. What the briefer told my student and warned him about something called an outflow boundary. I'm a cfi, should know what that is. But, you know, but I. Okay, I didn't have a clue. All right, let's just take off and we'll go back to Houston. Clear and beautiful. We're flying along. It's relatively calm and smooth outside. About three or four o'clock in the afternoon. And I see some dust on a. On a field out in front of us. It looked like a. Like a farmer's field. And you know, like maybe there's a combine or something, you know, harvesting corn or something like that and kicking up some dust. Didn't think twice about it. And about five seconds later, bam.
31:22
Pat Brown
We get hit. I don't know by what. And the airplane goes almost inverted. Almost a warrior. Almost inverted. What? I mean, we invented curse words at that point. He was able to his. To his credit, he was able to right the ship. And, and we, and we were just getting beat to heck and I told him, turn around. And went back the other way and got into smooth air. Both of us looking at each other. What was that? Don't know. So we fly south for a little bit and say, okay, well, let's go turn back east and head to Houston again. About five minutes later, we get hit. Bam. Again, the same thing. Not quite inverted this time, but there was stuff flying all over the cockpit and again turn south and get away from it.
32:06
Pat Brown
We actually ended up landing at a neighborhood airport, walking to a restaurant, having dinner and waiting until dark to go home. And it was a smooth flight. And in doing some research, I found out that was the outflow boundary that they were talking about. It was the. You know, we always talk about the micro bursts coming out of the bottom of thunderstorm. 6,000ft per minute is, you know, what you typically hear. Stay 20 miles away from thunderstorms because you don't want to get the hail and you don't want to get the down bursts and the wind shear and things like that. But I never heard the term outflow boundary. You stop to think about where all that wind goes when it hits the ground. It bounces and it goes out in an outflow boundary or a gust front. That's another term for it.
32:53
Pat Brown
Same thing. And that's when I learned that if you believe the 20 miles is far enough to be away from a dissipating thunderstorm, you are an inviting tragedy.
33:08
Bobby Doss
Yes.
33:09
Pat Brown
So now, in our case, these were really severe thunderstorms, and there were a lot of them. But, boy, I'll tell you what, I have given thunderstorms a whole lot wider berth than just 20 miles since then.
33:27
Bobby Doss
Yeah, unlike Wally, I don't have to fly anywhere I want to. So my perimeter, or the diameter from the middle of a thunderstorm is much larger than most, I'm sure. But I bet there's a million stories out there where we've all learned a little something. Take heed to that. That's why there's so much information about weather. That's why every ACS talks about the weather knowledge you're supposed to have as a pilot. And you probably don't want to make your wife mad either, if you want to have fun flying. So do the right thing. And as always, thanks for listening and stay behind the prop.
34:02
Nick Alan
Thanks for checking out the behind the Prop podcast. Be sure to click subscribe and check us out online@brave.theprop.com behind the prop is recorded in Houston, Texas. Creator and host is Bobby Doss. Co host is Wally Mulhern. The show is for entertainment purposes only and is not meant to replace actual flight instruction. Thanks for listening and remember, fly safe.