I’m about to head back for Toulouse one last time and as usual, I would like to get a flight or two before going away. I have been looking at the weather and with the recent snow storm, it was hard to plan anything. At the beginning of last week, I could see two opportunities for a flight: one on Friday evening and one on Saturday morning.

Friday evening flight

For the entire day, I have been keeping an eye on the weather. I know that as a student pilot, Summit Aviation has some minimums weather parameters before letting a student solo. These minimums are 2,500’ AGL ceiling for pattern work and 3,500’ AGL ceiling for the practice area. Anything below that and the insurance would not work. But today was not the case, over the entire week, we had fairly low ceiling. Today, the ceiling has started at 3,100 and was slowly decreasing. By the time I reached the airport, it was down to 2,700’. This is enough to stay in the pattern, which I was intending to do anyhow. I prepared the plane for a departure and finally got in touch with my instructor to ask for permissions. He checked the weather and call me back giving me a no go! Reason: I can solo, only during day VFR and with a cross wind less than 7 knots. And of course, I checked the weather and it was 7 knots but when he checked, the weather had picked up some speed and was now clocking at 8 knots! One extra knots over my minimum and that is a no go. It is reluctantly, but with understanding, that I put the airplane back in the T-hangar!
I thought about waiting a little more but I can do only day VFR conditions and the official sunset was 5:54pm and it was already 5:25pm. Trying to wait would have been useless. Also, since Michael was busy, I couldn’t ask him to get in the plane for a short session.

Oh well, the news is that it should clear up tomorrow morning. It’s just delayed a little.

Saturday Morning

After an agitated night, I was finally ready to go fly but of course, first thing, need to check the weather! And the result was … not exactly what I was expected!

Michael had told me to check the weather and if the weather was not good enough for flying solo, I can give him a call and we would do a regular session.

But what the weather station from Bentonville was announcing was simply not what I wanted to see. Wind was fairly calm so the 7 knots limitations would have been ok. But the ceiling was at 200 feet! And the visibility was under 1/2 statute mile! There is no way to fly even IFR at that point. We would have no way of landing with the minimums. So it was back to bed instead of gone flying! Bummer!

Of course, it did clear up and now that I’m ready to take the plane to go back to Toulouse, we have a 10,000 feet ceiling and some winds (9 knots gusting 16).

I guess my next flight is going to have to wait 2 weeks until I’m coming back from France!