Back from Colorado - Part 2

Where was I? Oh yes, stuck in Amarillo watching the radar. Anyway, I forgot exactly how long we were there, but after watching the radar and talking to FSS it looked like we had a window of opportunity to get to Pueblo. The briefer pointed out a gust front where the doppler was showing an extreme shirt in wind speed/direction. He said to be careful with that.

We got back in the plane and started it up. The wind was still blowing pretty hard but the bad weather looked to be east of our course. While we were doing the runup, ground control called us to to say that a Cirrus SR22 reported severe turbulence at 11,000 over Dalhart. Well, that was the gust front, and that's the route we were taking so we sat and thought about that for a couple of minutes. The boys were already falling asleep, so I said, "Let's go see what it's like and we can turn around if it's getting too rough." We took off and the up/down drafts were still pretty strong and I was thinking, "This might be interesting." We kept going and while it was not worse than moderate turbulence, we were still getting tossed around quite a bit. Even with the manifold pressure and propeller RPM at the bottom of the green arcs in the guages, we were still bumping into the yellow arc on the airspeed indicator. I was worried about stresses on the airplane at a couple of points so to slow down and stabilize it a little I dumped the landing gear. That helped so as it smoothed out I put the gear back up. I wasn't having any trouble keeping the airplane under control, but it was gettin worse. I actually told my wife, "Listen, if we get tossed totally sideway or even if you go upside down, don't freak out, we'll be fine. I don't expect it to get that bad, but wanted to say it just in case." Finally as we neared Dalhart it got a little rougher. I was keeping the airplane at maneuvering speed at this point, which is the speed you use to minimize the chances of overstressing the airframe. Suddenly, BOOM!! We must have hit the center of the gust front because we had a huge bounce that actually unseated my headset from my ears! Fortunately that was the worst of it. It actually started smoothing out after that and it got smoother and smoother as we neared Pueblo. We kept watching the rain in the distance but were able to stay away from it without any effort. We finally started talking to Pueblo approach and started our descent. We had trouble picking out the airport since we were unfamiliar with the area, so even though we were in visual conditions we elected to track the localizer inbound until we saw the airport.

One funny note about the landing... On short approach I noticed a big jackrabbit run across the runway. After we landed and got the plane tied down, I mentioned the rabbit to my wife. She said, "You think that was funny? I looked almost straight down as we approached the runway and there just have been 20 of them scatter in all directions just before we crossed the numbers!"

So, after a long day and some interesting moments, we had finally made it to Colorado where we tied down the plane, picked up the rent car, and headed out to Salida where we spent the next week. More on the return trip next. It'll be pretty boring compared to parts 1 and 2!