We beat the storms

I got to the airport at 1:30 this afternoon and my instructor and I chatted a bit about the weather. I gave him all the details I had and said I thought we could make the trip out to Nashua and back at 3,500.

We agreed to try it at 5,500 with the idea that if we saw clouds at or below our altitude, we would drop down to 3,500.

We departed Northampton, contacted Bradley departure and started our climb to 5,500. We crossed the western arm of Quabbin reservoir at about 4,000 and reached 5,500 by the time we crossed the eastern arm. Bradley passed us off to Boston center and we continued on our merry way.

As we were approaching Gardner, there was a wall of clouds that went below our altitude so we started down to 3,500. Even at 3,500 we still passed through a cloud. That was, to say the least, an interesting experience for me. There is no vision out the windows at all and I had to pay attention to my attitude, my altitude and my air speed using only the instruments.

Once we passed through the cloud wall, we had about 6 miles visibility. Boston center passed us off to Boston Logan and they indicated we had some unidentified traffic about 6 miles to our 1:00 at our altitude. This made us a little nervous because "unidentified" usually means someone that is out of contact with the air traffic controllers and our limited visibility made it difficult at best to see anything.

We eventually spotted him. At first I though it was a bird because it was flipping around but as we got closer, we saw it was someone doing acrobatics. I changed course to steer well clear of him, we thanked Boston and they handed us off to Nashua.

We did one touch & go in Nashua and headed back to Northampton. The trip home was a little slower because of the headwind but it was far less eventful until we got to Northampton. As we crossed Quabbin and spotted UMass, we also spotted a line of thunderstorms heading towards the airport. I told John that I was going to nail the landing because there was no time for a go around. He thought that was a great idea.

As promised, I nailed the landing, we taxied to the parking area, tied down the aircraft and made it inside before the rain hit.

I got to experience several new things today which include flying through a cloud, talking to Boston center, talking to Logan, safely avoiding an aircraft that wasn't communicating and avoiding a thunderstorm.

Next week, we're off to Block Island.

I love this stuff.

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There is no baseball tonight so I'll be watching something else. I'm not sure what but it'll be something else.

While I struggle to find something, anything, of interest on TV tonight, you can visit these links:

• I can understand why she's the ex-girlfriend.



• The plunger made me laugh out loud.