Oct 07 2011

Day 8… Icing in the Rockys

Today was the beginning of the rest of my trip. After staying with Lee and Terry, it was time me to test the electronic ignition to see if replacing the terminal with a wire would really and permanently fix the ignition problem.

20111008-212054.jpg

After saying good by to my fantastic hosts, it was time to take the bird up for a test flight.

Lee and I took off and headed south, Lee was heading to his job in Denver so I thought I would take a quick picture of him silhouetted against the Rocky Mountains.

20111008-212103.jpg

I flew for about 30 minutes, landed and checked the bird out and headed northwest toward Salt Lake City.

20111008-212111.jpg

Tho country was breath taking from the air and quite desolate too.

20111008-212118.jpg

20111008-212130.jpg

Somewhere about 1.5 hrs (of a 3.4 hr trip), I started encountering high clouds (not shown on any weather predictions) and since the outside air temp was about 24F I knew I had might start to develop icing. I was given a block altitude of 12,000-17,000 ft, and started climbing. Eventually everything went IFR which wasnt good.

20111008-212137.jpg

Shit, I started picking up icing on the air frame, which in any airplane is not good and especially bad for a canard. Here you might be able to the ice on the front canopy which means ice on the wings too.

20111008-212143.jpg

Whenever I had a chance to see the country side (less and less frequent) through the sucker holes, it was beautiful.

After what seemed an eternity of being in the clouds feeling the plane get heavier with ice, I finally cleared the mountains to the west of SLC, made an immediate decent into warmer air of the valley to divert to the closest available airport (Ogden, UT) to check the plane out. As soon as the air warmed up, the ice started coming off in sheets from the canard and windshield and finally the plane started picking up speed and returning to normal.

20111008-212148.jpg

In this picture I was trying to show what remained of the buildup of ice on the wings… about 1/2″ remained on the leading edge of the main wing. Most of the ice on the canard had already sheeted of and went through the prop.

I have had a few incidents of ice on the plane, so this was not the first time this has happened to me. Since then, I make it a point of completely avoiding icing conditions. Period. I never fly into conditions where icing is possible. Sometime there is no way to know what is in front of you from the available weather information, nothing below you where you can land, cant go back so you must go forward. Thinking back, I should have been able to completely clear the clouds at about 18 or 19,000 ft, and should have just kept climbing… oh, well hind site, another lesson learned….

20111008-212153.jpg

After checking the bird over and a quick call to Rick, I flew about a 25 min VFR fight from just above SLC down to his airport just south of the city. Parked the bird in a big hanger and it off to lunch….

This is another adventure, I don’t care to repeat……