From an interview with AvWeb:
AvWeb interview
One of the chapters of "Inside the Sky" is about storm flying. Can you describe it, tell us what you've learned by doing it, and are you still doing it?
I realized that the kind of flying I like the most is at night in bad weather. Each experience is different, so what you learn from one doesn't necessarily help you later. But you gather a vague and large body of knowledge, with a few basic rules having mostly to do with escape routes. There are a few friends of mine who are also interested in it, and realized it wouldn't be safe to go out into heavy weather on their own, so we do it together. After we land we'll find a hotel somewhere, have dinner and talk about what we did, look at the weather and figure out what we're going to do tomorrow. This is not the kind of trip you want to take inexperienced people on. We dress warmly and we're not surprised if it rains on us after we land.
It takes about a week to do it right, and it typically has to be in the winter when the weather is worse and more complex. We wait for a big low pressure system to form, and it takes about five days to track that system from the west to the east. It doesn't mean we just fly to the center of the low every time or fly to where the weather is worst. If you did that you'd wind up dying very fast. We watch the fronts, and we factor in the capability of the airplane we're in. I've done this in the 414, but it's not that interesting because you can go high, or go through the ice. It's not like you can exactly shrug off the weather, but almost. The ideal airplane is one with a **CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED** good engine, and **CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED** good radios, a **CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED****CENSORED** good intercom, radar — or at least a Stormscope — and an aircraft that isn't certified for ice — because you don't want to be dealing with ice. We know about the classic icing accident where the entire airplane loads up, but that's probably a quarter of the icing accidents. With ice there are all kinds of subtleties and unknowns from airplane to airplane and from one icing encounter to another. Ice is scary stuff and it will kill you.
This sounds like one of those trips where the pilots not flying are as busy as the pilot flying.
Absolutely. It makes no difference to me at all. This is brain work and who's holding the yoke doesn't really matter.
How do you brief one of these trips?
It's like air traffic control. It's in how you talk, it's in the code words, it's in the joke you tell. You very rarely run across a pedantic guy who tells you that "VFR flight is not recommended." If you do, you hang up, call back and get somebody else. What we're doing is strictly legal, so you tell the briefer "We're doing a training run. We're looking for certain types of weather. Let's start by talking structure, and our destination isn't determined yet." Usually the briefer catches on and gives you what you're after.
Do you use the internet?
When you're traveling it's not the most efficient way to brief. Sometimes we'll stay in a places that don't have fast connections, so we use the WSI and DTN systems in the FBOs, and one of my favorite ways to get weather is the New York Times national weather page. It's generated by Penn State, it's super low-tech and it's extremely good. Often it turns out to be the most accurate forecast out there.
Of course, a big part of this training is the judgment you place on the information you're getting. The ground-based weather people believe they're right because they often have no way of knowing when they're wrong. They don't know the structure inside the weather. Usually after a few days, we've got a better feel for the structure of a system than the National Weather Service does. By the time they realize they've made a mistake about the intensity of the speed of a front, we've known about it for hours.
And perhaps the most important briefings are the ones you do over the radio in the air.
Do you use Flight Watch?
It depends on your altitude, what kind of information you want and where you are. Flight Watch is excellent in the Midwest for radar returns, but it's not so good out West, and it's often too busy for the kind of quick information we need. You've got maybe 120 seconds off the center frequency and you don't want to spend them hearing about Airmets, Sigmets and forecasts. The key word is "Only." If you can get them to drop their checklist and give you "only" the current observations. There's a whole art of extracting information from Flight Watch or Flight Service. That's part of the training, too.
What kinds of systems won't you go near?
It depends very much on the type of airplane involved, temperature gradients, how much fuel we have, and it's hard to generalize. It's extremely rare for us not to get through to a destination, but it does happen. I do retreat, and I always have at least two levels of escape routes. You never, ever go into a situation where you don't have an out, and an out for that out. It's not thrill-seeking. It's a very technical training exercise that's a real bonding experience for the pilots you go with.
