The Blue and The Gray

No this is not a civil war post.  We had a Birthday party to attend in Atlanta.  It was mid day Sunday and we decided to leave Saturday to get some extra time with the Birthday boy, he is now 3.  Leaving Saturday it was blue.  Like really blue.

Arriving into Atlanta things were easy.  I have learned and had filed the correct arrival.  Controllers seemed happy and we even got a bit of a shortcut on the way into Peachtree Dekalb airport.  This included a nice view of Stone Mountain.

The whole way over I kept saying, I can't believe the weather is going to stink Sunday.  We arrived, had a great time at the playground, ate and then settled in.  The forecast was for low rainy weather across all of Georgia but at midnight, it was still clear across the entire South East.

We awoke to rain and clouds. First a line of rain came through and then the clouds started getting lower.  We headed off to the party but decided to book before cake.  It was a good move.  I had been watching things and there was a break to the East.

Departing Atlanta it was smooth and cloudy but little rain until about 50 miles out.  Then we entered the rain zone where it was light to moderate for the next hour plus.  We headed towards Savannah to get around the heavy stuff.  We were mostly between layers and it didn't look too bad to the sides but we had little visibility ahead with the rain.

We had a few minutes of bigger rain drops as we passed North of Dublin, then it went back to steady medium.  I had been concerned about ice higher up so we stayed at 7000 where the temperatures were 45 to 47F.  About 30 North of Jacksonville we broke out and had an easy visual approach back home.  We put the plane away and I watched the weather some more, it had closed up behind us and then really gone down.  Glad we scooted early and made it home before it intensified.

How slow can you go

My last post was about speed. This one is the absence of speed.  Looking at the GPS lower left corner you can see the ground speed is 0.0 knots.  So what you say, anyone can sit in a plane and not go anywhere.  True but if you look closely in the picture I am sitting just off the coast of Saint Augustine above the surf, not going anywhere.

We often discuss that the plane only care about the apparent wind and not the actual ground speed.  Thus if I am going 90 knots air speed and the wind is blowing 90 knots, the plane is actually standing still.  Below is the primary flight display shows no ground speed while I am indicating 76 knots. 

I was actually still moving 2 knots at that point.  I slowed down a bit more and was actually moving backwards at 3 knots.  It was a fun thing to do and demonstrated what we all learn in theory in groundschool.