N52697

N52679   Cessna Skyhawk SP   C-172S   Lakeland, Flordia to Wycombe, England
Date	Destination	Distance (nm)	Flight time (hh+mm)
22 Feb	Palatka, Florida	101	53
A front in southeast Georgia would have pushed me out to sea, so I just moved the airplane to Palatka and spend the night with Hugh Rawls, another ferry pilot who's flying a 172 to the same destination.
23 Feb	Elizabethtown, North Carolina	349	2+57
After all the rain from the front there was fog and low ceilings in the morning, which broke up towards noon.  At Elizabethtown I checked to see if there was any way to get to Bangor.  If I'd been carrying diptheria serum to Nome, I'd have forced a way through.  But I'm not, so I'm spending the night here.

Date	Destination	Distance (nm)	Flight time (hh+mm)
24 Feb	Bangor, Maine	777	6+24
I considered stopping to fill up with relatively cheap fuel at Westfield, Massachusetts, but their forecast was discouraging, so I filed non-stop to Bangor, hoping to be able to stay on top of the ice that was forecast in a swath along the northern border of Massachusetts.  Once I was past New York, where ATC typically brings you down to 5,000 feet—since all the other altitudes are full of airplanes arriving at or departing from JFK, La Guardia, Newark, Teterboro, and White Plains—I climbed to 11,000 feet.  It wasn't enough.  I was able to deviate around a few of the cumulus tops, but by the time I reached New Hampshire I was in solid cloud, picking up ice, and looking for a place to land.  Concord was conveniently far ahead and had good weather, so I got a clearance to go there.  But at 4,000 feet the OAT was 0° Celsius and the ice was melting off the wings.  I told Center that if I could get Bangor at 4,000 feet, I'd take it.  He cleared me direct.  Once past Lewiston and over lower terrain, I asked for 3000 feet, since the OAT was still zero at 4,000.  But down at three it was -2, and the wind, which had become a 40-knot crosswind at four, was now right in my face.  I climbed back to 4,000 and never picked up any ice there.  In fact, the temperature went up to +1 as I approached Bangor.  But I was at the only altitude without ice, and if the weather hadn't been reasonably good at the airports along the route, it would have been foolhardy to continue.  When I descended again to three, to shoot the ILS to Bangor, the OAT went back down to -2 and I started picking up moderate rime, but I landed before it became a problem, and it was already melting off as I tied the airplane down.
28 Feb	Goose Bay, Labrador	608	4+50
In reaching Bangor I'd slipped through a crease in a major storm which dropped a couple feet of snow on New York and knocked out power for a million people.  Hugh, in the other airplane, had stopped short of the fray in Newburgh, New York, and now he was one of those camping in the dark.  The weather wasn't that bad in Bangor, just strong winds and a lot of rain alternating with snow, but it was days before there was any way north from Bangor in a 172 apart from scud-running between the hilltops, and that's rarely a good idea. But on Sunday, Hugh was able to fly to Bangor, and he reported he'd been on top at 7,000 feet.  There was a band of weather over the Saint Lawrence River that we could probably get over.  If that failed and we started to ice up, we'd have to turn around early and come back to Houlton, Maine, or Charlo, New Brunswick, because the airports along the river had low ceilings and visibility, with freezing rain in the forecast.  But in fact the tops were no higher than 10,000 feet, and we saw very little ice on the way to Goose, arriving around 20:00 local, in time for a sandwich and a snooze before getting up early to fly to Iceland.
01 Mar	Reykjavik, Iceland	1342	10+54
02 Mar	Wick, Scotland	653	5+38
03 Mar	Wycombe, England	436	3+55

Comments

[Bob Echols]

Great to see you back in the air on the web. Good luck Gerald.