Life experiences offer us opportunities to learn. Sometimes, if things don’t go too badly and we share the stories, others can learn from our mistakes or questionable decisions. I have no problem sharing those decisions I’ve made in the hope that others can learn from them. This is one of those tales.
I was flying back from Washington, D.C. after some meetings, connecting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and then continuing on to Grand Rapids, Michigan on an airline that shall remain unnamed but is still on my personal do-not-fly list for this and a few other infractions that left me with less-than-desirable service memories.
Just before pushback at KDCA, I got the notification on my phone that my last flight leg had been canceled. “Weather” was the given reason. “Huh?” I thought. The weather isn’t that bad at home. In fact, when I did a little digging while we were taxiing out, I found the conditions to be better than 5,000 feet overcast with better than 10 miles’ visibility at Grand Rapids, and Milwaukee was clear. What the heck are they canceling my flight for? I started fuming.
I wanted to get home.
So I started texting.
A friend “with an airline that also shall remain unnamed” confirmed my suspicion. The next leg I was supposed to be on was a virtually empty flight. The weather had nothing to do with the cancellation. And I wanted to get home.
Annoyed and searching for options, I shot a quick text to another pilot friend.
“Busy?” I asked.
“No, why?” he responded.
“Want to run up to the airport and grab my Cherokee and shoot over to pick me up in Milwaukee so I can get home tonight?” I asked as much as I pleaded.
“Heck yeah,” my VFR-only private pilot friend responded.
A few details were worked out, and we were set for him to meet me about the same time I would be landing, and then I would fly my own darn self home VFR for the night. To heck with the airline and its bull**** weather excuse, I thought.
The flight on Airline X to Milwaukee was uneventful. I hopped a taxi (this was before Uber and Lyft days) from the main terminal over to the GA FBO, where I found Bruce, my buddy who had come to my rescue, waiting for me to go home.
But there was a hiccup. We didn’t take the hints.
Bruce had flown over to pick me up by heading straight across Lake Michigan in the single-engine Piper Cherokee, and while doing so, he found that the cloud deck was getting lower as he made the trip. The clouds were thickening, and climbing through them with me (now onboard as an IFR pilot) was really not going to be an option since the temperature was dropping, and those clouds were likely to have a bunch of ice in them.
So, we would just fly below them, I decided, wanting to get home. I wasn’t smart enough that day to step back and break the chain of bad decisions and mitigate a few more risks.
And that’s the point. Stepping back, identifying when risks are starting to pile on top of each other, and mitigating as many of them as possible or even making the decision that too many are piling up is a key factor in risk management for all of us as pilots. It is easy to get stuck in the “I must get home” and “nothing will go wrong” mentality. Had ANYTHING gone wrong on this particular flight as we ventured across Lake Michigan in the dark at 2,500 feet MSL, a mere 1,900 feet or so above the water without reliable communications, there is no doubt it would have been a last flight.
The only good news was that there was a heck of a wind out of the west, approximately 60 knots, and we got across Lake Michigan quickly. It surely didn’t feel quick enough about halfway across the lake when Chicago approach notified us that we were “no longer in radar contact” since we were so low (at that point about 2,500 feet MSL) and below their radar coverage. They had radio contact and told us to feel free to inform them “if we needed any services” or had any challenges along the route. We were effectively on our own a little above the water, in the
