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Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Safety-conscious instrument pilots carry all sorts of unbiased, self-imposed minimums: no flight into IMC at night; forecast of 500-foot ceilings or better at your destination; or seven or more hours of sleep in the previous 24 hours. But I don't know of any who have even thought about the maximum time to allow between their departure and their most recent check of the weather.
It's actually a complex question, with dozens of variables. Running an hour late may be no big deal when most of the TAFs along your route are one-liners. Even 15 minutes may be too long when a solid line of convection is expected to cross your departure route.
Just a Slight Delay
One fall morning many years ago I had planned an IFR flight to leave just after sunrise from Baltimore, headed to Chicago. This was before I had any fancy satellite weather gear or ice protection. Based on the infrared satellite image, forecast soundings and a couple key pilot reports. I planned to depart Baltimore and get on top of the lake-effect snow and light rain currently underway over western Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana. Cruising at 12,000 feet would keep me in clear air and ice free. I had a nearly clear sky in Baltimore, and the forecast was for scattered clouds in Chicago.
The forecast gave me a short window of opportunity. An overcast ceiling would move into Baltimore later in the morning, and that scattered deck in Chicago was forecast to give way to a broken ceiling an hour or two after my planned arrival time
I got my IFR clearance on my handheld radio. But, when I went out to drain the sumps in my Turbo Arrow IV, half of my GATS Jar was filled with something other than avgas on the left tank. I had to clean a fair amount of wet snow off of the wings earlier that morning, and possibly some of that managed to get into the tanks when they refueled the aircraft overnight. Needless to say, I wasn't going to be departing...
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