Postcards from the Sky by Erin Seidemann

Author:Erin Seidemann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2015-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I WOKE UP THE NEXT DAY IN A BETTER MOOD, HOPING that I would finally get to the Bahamas and out of the cold weather that day. I called a weather briefer.

“It’s VFR all the way to Palm Beach, but there’s a stationary low over Grand Bahama and low cloud ceilings all day,” he told me.

VFR stands for visual flight rules. It means (in the United States, anyway) that the pilot must have at least three miles of visibility, and that the cloud ceiling—the lowest layer of clouds that covers more than half of the sky—must be at least 1,000 feet high in order to legally fly without an IFR (instrument flight rules) flight plan and clearance. IFR means the weather is such that visibility and cloud ceiling are less than VFR, so the pilot must fly the plane mostly or even solely by reference to the instruments rather than observing what is outside. I had an instrument rating, enabling me to fly in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions) if I wished, but it’s more risky to do that in an unfamiliar area—not a boundary I wanted to test on this trip. So I decided to land in Lantana, Florida, near Palm Beach, and see what the weather was doing by then.

Once in the air, it appeared that Otto was still on vacation—and not the same vacation I was on. I tried it again on two different modes, but neither mode worked. It seemed as if my autopilot “knew” what my course was, but it wouldn’t capture the course—it just kept zigzagging around it in huge waves. So in the end, I had to hand-fly Orion again the whole rest of the way, an inconvenience for such a long flight.

I felt myself tensing up over Otto’s failure to cooperate—I could really use a minute to sit back and stretch, I thought. But then I reminded myself that I was supposed to enjoy this vacation, no matter what. I consciously made the decision to relax. Oh well, I told myself. This is why I fly, right? Adventure!

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