Long-distance Route Planning in Bad Weather

Route portion Albuquerque, NM - Las Cruces, NM - Andrews, TX

A recent trip from Dallas to Albuquerque, NM, to visit my daughter Ingrid went well. The weather cooperated for the flight except for a modest headwind. 

During the visit, we hiked the first two thirds--the easy part--of the Pino Trail in the Sandia Mountains. 

Start of Pino Trail, Albuquerque, NM. Photo courtesy Jeanette Bynum

Bushes were in bloom; a perfect day.

Banana Yucca

Creeping Mahonia

Fendlerbush

When we fly to Albuquerque, we typically visit friends Lynn and Philip near Deming on the return trip. But this time, the schedule was tight, and we had to get back to Dallas in a hurry.

However, the weather was not cooperating. The direct route to Dallas was blocked by nasty IFR weather; see above screenshot. An alternate route via El Paso seemed possible, but how could we plan it with rapidly shifting fronts?

To the rescue came a feature of the Garmin Pilot that previously we had used just for checking destination weather and never for route planning: Terminal Area Forecasts (TAF). Here is an example.

Terminal Area Forecast for Sheppard Air Force Base/Wichita Falls Municipal Airport

The TAF for the airport says that low IFR or just IFR can be expected up to about 14:30 Zulu, which is 9:30 am CDT. From then on, marginal VFR is forecast to prevail. Indeed according to the next portion of the TAF, not shown above, the weather is to become VFR around 11:00 am CDT. 

To plan the route, we looked at all airports with TAFs. Unfortunately, the Garmin Pilot does not identify them unless you click on the weather icons. But we know that TAFs are produced for the major airports. So by focusing on them, we got the desired information.

Next, we wrote down for each such airport when at least marginal VFR was expected. Finally, we picked a route where such weather would prevail at the airports near the route by the time we got there. 

The selected route brought us from Albuquerque down to El Paso, TX, and from there to Dallas. For refueling, we stopped in Las Cruces, NM, just short of El Paso, and in Andrews, TX. Both airports have runways in all directions, which was important during a day with strong and shifting winds.

The Garmin Pilot now offers everything needed for a legal briefing: TAFs, as described; NOTAMS for the airports; weather forecasts; active SIGMETs and AIRMETs; TFRs and their conditions; and predicted groundspeed for all altitudes. The last item proved to be very useful: For two legs of the trip, moderate headwinds at low altitudes switched to 30 kts tailwinds from 9,500 ft MSL and up. Once we had selected everything for the flight plan of a leg, we filed it with a single click. 

Enroute weather often is different, and sometimes very different, from predictions. But SIGMETs and AIRMETs are updated on the map as we proceed, the weather is always displayed for the entire route, and, most importantly, TAFs are conservative estimates. Thus, weather typically is at least as good as forecast by them. It was that way on our trip. 

But even with properly selected altitudes, it turned out to be a long trip: We spent 7.5 hrs in the air to fly 685 nm, a testament that our plane is slow indeed. It was a long and tiring day, but also a safely executed trip under difficult weather conditions.

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