SEA-RNO-PHX 31 December 2005
We start our day last day of three in Spokane, WA in light rain.
The day prior we traveled up the coast of CA through the rain in SJC as a huge winter storm bore down on the SFO bay. From San Jose we bumped our way up to SEA in light jiggles with an occasional bump or two. The forecast for the Bay area was grim for the next day: Six to eight inches of rain forecast with high winds. Sacramento was due the same later in the day and the whole weather “enchilada” was headed right toward the Tahoe/Reno area about the time we were to pass through on our last leg of the trip. No sense in losing any sleep over it. Often times Mother Nature changes direction and intensity and things turn out to be no big deal.
As the sun rises, we cruise over to SEA from Spokane. As we fly long, we pull up the latest WX from the bay. Not good. Heavy rain already (it’s just sunrise there) and the winds are up to 25mph directly across the runway in Oakland and forecast to go higher. The crosswind limit for a 737 is 35mph.
After grabbing a breakfast burrito in SEA, I check our paperwork and dispatch has given us an arrival alternate out of RNO of Boise Idaho. That is downwind of the storm track but, out of it’s way….for a few hours at least. I’d rather see PHX as my alternate but we are too heavy to carry all these folks, their bags, and the gas necessary to fly to RNO, descend and try an approach, and then climb back to altitude and then drone to PHX –and have the required 45 minutes of reserve fuel required by FAA regs. I call that “Mom and the kids” fuel” (which you will understand more about later). The RNO WX is a high ceiling (about 3500 feet above the airport which sits at about 4400 feet above sea level) and the visibility (the deal breaker in determining whether you are legal to even start the approach) is over a mile in heavy rain. We only need a half mile. We are good to go with a hip-pocket alternate of Boise.
We blast off for RNO in light rain and light chop. As we turn toward RNO, we are gifted with a majestic view of Mt. Rainier off to our left. Then it’s back into the clouds until we top out at 35,000 feet. The FA’s have been briefed to get cabin service done and then get cleaned up before descent. I want every “tush in a cush” before I start down. They agree. One of the FA’s has confided to me that turbulence scares her. Crewmembers are human too.
The ride at cruise is pretty darn smooth. As we drone toward RNO, Randy is playing “check the weather” on the computer. Each report from the bay and Sacramento is getting worse as we head south. Winds at Oakland are now borderline in heavy rain with visibility down to ½ mile –right at approach minimums. By the time we get close to descent we hear ATC issuing holding instructions for planes headed that way. Planes are going missed approach due to the winds and weather and the San Francisco/Oakland bay is turning into a beehive of planes trying to land. It’s time for us to start down now. I fire off an electronic message to “Mother” to see if anyone has reported anything around RNO lately. They respond with a curt two word answer: NO REPORTS. I send them a note I will call them on the ground with a pilot report (PIREP).
We have checked the WX for RNO and the winds are fairly light at 12 gust to 16 from the south. That’s good because the runway is oriented north-south and that means the winds won’t be from across the Sierras, the base of which is where Reno is situated. Turbulence interacts with terrain features like light reacts with an object: anything near the shadow of the light (wind) will probably be bumpy. The city of RNO sits in a valley just east of the Sierras and Lake Tahoe with a smaller ridge line just to the east of town. The rain is falling heavily at the airport but I applied RAIN-X in Spokane earlier this morning and that will allow us to see even better when we get into the wet stuff. (RAIN-X is great for cars but awesome on airliners. I never fly without my trusty rain repellant.)
With everyone briefed and strapped in, we begin a very smooth descent all the way to 14,000 feet and as advertised, we hit rolling and bumping that intensifies as we descend. The plan is that we will stay high and descend as steeply as possible through the bumpy layers so as to minimize our exposure to the turbulence. With our plans made, we check in on RNO approach frequency and are advised that the winds have suddenly changed and the airport is now landing to the north. This means we will now have to drive about 15 miles further right through the worst of the ride. We are committed to a long and bumpy ride.
As we get abeam the airport at about 8000 feet, the big rolling and sudden yawing and bumping starts. We are directly downwind of the Tahoe area, the tallest mountains around, and we are feeling the full brunt of the 50+ mph winds blowing across the ridgeline. At times, the plane feels like a leaf in a sink of water caught in the drain swirl. We suddenly slam to the right, shudder and roll as we sink 30-50 feet before stopping suddenly and rebounding to our cruise altitude. I am sure the passengers think we are falling hundreds of feet. I marvel that Otto is still holding on. He has limits to what he can do and when those are reached, he’ll disconnect and it will be up to me to drive. Autopilots recover in turbulence smoother and more comfortably that people do. Times like this that makes an autopilot worth it’s weight in gold. The airspeed indicator is bouncing between 245 knots and our flaps up minimum speed of 210 kts. If we are going to land we must start slowing down. I tell Randy to drop flaps to 5 as I try to hold some airspeed between flap limiting speed and our minimum flaps 5 speed. The needle is bouncing +/- 20 knots.
Ahead of us about three minutes is an American 757. He’s bigger and slightly more powerful but his ride and wind observations are the key to my decision to continue. They are only calling moderate. Just in case I am formulating escape plans. We are flying down the east edge of a narrow valley right over the ridgeline and will have to do a right “U-turn” to line up with the runway and land. If I choose to escape now, I will fly to the south and climb as fast as possible. Once I turn base (90 degrees to the runway, just before lining up on final) I will be facing the mountain. Do I turn right and go out the way I came or do I try and turn left and hope the weather only extends as far south as it does to the north? We are getting pounded harder now as we approach the mountain. About 20% of the time, I can barely read the instruments as we bump around and then it calms to just moderate.
I tell Randy that if it gets any worse by 2000 feet above the ground (AGL), we are escaping to the north. We have good reports from approach that the 757 has landed and we are now vectored on an intercept heading with the approach corridor into RNO. The type approach we are flying is called a “non precision” approach because it lacks the beam giving me a glideslope (the up-down beam to the runway identifying a 3 degree descent angle.). I have lateral guidance to keep me in the middle of the valley between the mountains off to our left and right but must rely on step down altitudes to ensure we stay away from the mountains and hills. Otto cannot fly this type approach on his own, so I punch off the autopilot and hand-fly the remainder of the approach. We are about 3500 feet above the runway, about 13 miles out and the crosswind is hitting 75kts. I am flying the localizer beam trying to keep the airspeed within limits and Randy is keeping track of the step down altitudes as we get closer to the field. If I get off course, we will have no choice but to go around. After taking a good spanking for the better part of ten minutes, I do not want to let this happen.
Once satisfied I have lined up on the runway using instruments, ATC Approach hands us off to RNO TOWER. We check in with RNO TOWER and they advise winds on the ground are light now. The AA 757 that has just landed called smooth rides below 800 feet. We break out of the clouds about ten miles out and have the airport in sight. I tell the passengers who by now can see the ground if they have a window seat (and are looking outside) “We are almost there folks.” I know many have their eyes closed which make it far worse. Trust me, a window seat is where you want to be once the ground comes into sight. It shows you that even after big bumps or rolling motions, the plane has actually moved very little. The movement was very rapid over a short distance. (Engineers like Sean and Ken know this as “high frequency, short amplitude” motion. It is the abrupt nature that is startling.)
Almost as an afterthought, TOWER advises us that the 757 saw an instant loss of 15 knots at 1500 feet above the ground. I stare at my altimeter and do the math from the 4400 foot airport elevation: We are there now and as advertised, the airspeed drops 15 kts in an instant. I have been carrying lots of extra speed for “Mom and the kids” so the effect is zero. As we get down to about 800 feet, the ride smoothes out and by touchdown there is hardly a bump. We touch down in light rain with light winds. In front of us off the end of the runway is a glimmer of blue sky. On rollout, I tell Randy we are going for that hole of blue on our way out of town.
We pull into the gate and shutdown. As I open the cockpit door I am greeted by the sight of a poor lady being aided by the FA as she looses breakfast into a garbage bag. I feel for her but have to go report our ride into RNO to Mother (SWA dispatch).
Via jetway phone I advise dispatch what we encountered on arrival. I suggest that if the weather conditions get any worse, as they are forecast to, we consider shutting down operations in RNO. He takes my pilot report (PIREP) and begins disseminating it to all the other planes headed our way so they know what we encountered. Dispatch asks me if I will depart and I tell him that we will. The approach leaves you down in the bumps longer, especially when they change runways on you, unlike a steep climb profile where you transition through altitude much faster. We got hammered extra hard for extra long but at least now we get to blast off to the north into blue sky. Or so I think.
I get back to the jet and do a cursory exterior inspection to make sure all the big parts are attached ( ) and then head to the cockpit where Randy has clearance to PHX. He also advises me that the winds in RNO have changed and are now blowing from the south at 20 mph. We will have to depart to the south if we are to leave Reno today. The longer we wait, the worse the weather will be. I brief the passengers who arrived with us and who will depart with us that the exposure to the bumps will be much shorter in duration as we blast to the south. The expressions on their faces do not reflect joy.
While boarding, I call RNO GROUND control and chat with this guy about the runway departure options. He tells me that the day prior, one of our guys got hit with a 50 mph crosswind gust just as they were about to touch down. They didn’t realize the wind speed until they landed and TOWER relayed the wind indication read on a dial in the tower. Remember, the crosswind limit for the 737 is 35kts. Good job by our guys the day prior. Clearly that is another limitation with a pretty good “fudge factor” to ensure safety.
I head back after loading and brief the passengers who just boarded what we will face on departure. Until I see otherwise, passenger drink service will be suspended indefinitely. Upon return to the cockpit, we run checklists and prepare for blast off.
As we push back and start motors, my tug driver tells me on interphone that a wind indicator on the high ridgeline near Tahoe hit 129 mph last night. That’s a level 5 hurricane –only with snow and ice pellets that cut into flesh.
As we taxi out we see a couple of planes land the way we had hoped to earlier (to the south). I ask the pilots what their ride was like and they say, “Constant moderate, not too bad.” Great! We are going south into the worst of it. I am hoping it has let up some. As we take the runway we stop for a few seconds and look at the fast moving clouds. It does appear there is a lightening of the cloud colors indicating there may be a momentary break. We check the radar just in case (still all red with heavy moisture in the sky ahead) and stand up the throttles.
In this kind of weather in this type terrain, windshear is always a concern. We just flew through the worst possible winds and weather in the very corridor we will fly on departure. In essence, we gave ourselves our own PIREP. But, just to add a extra margin of safety, I advised Randy prior to departure that we’d do an “adverse weather profile” departure. Unlike a normal takeoff where you accelerate to rotate speed and then climb at climbout speed to 1000 feet before raising flaps, we cover all our bases. We will use max power and rotate to only 15 degrees nose up. As the plane accelerates, we’ll retract flaps and get “smash” (speed, also called “energy”) to take on any nastiness Mother Nature might hold for us ahead.
Randy lifts off in smooth air and by the time we get to 15 degrees nose up, it’s time to retract the flaps to 1 at only 300 feet. By the time we get to 500 feet, we can raise the flaps all the way as we are accelerating rapidly. Before we hit the bumps at 800 feet, we are already going 230 kts and climbing really well. But, those bumps are still there and waiting and they let us know who’s boss. Four minutes from the runway, we are in occasional moderate in the sun on top of the nasty stuff. Ahead is a tall cloud mass I suspect holds more bumps but after climbing another five or six thousand feet through basically the same light to moderate (which by now is a blessing) we pop out on top in light chop. I keep the FA’s seated for now.
This is a typical occurence in turbulence: The arrival is much worse because the plane is slowly stepped down to the runway by ATC. On departure, your climb through 10,000 feet is pretty rapid and often unobstructed. You can be out of 10,000 three minutes after takeoff.
After leveling off, we switch to a new ATC sector and as we flip the switch we hear the controller on the new frequency reading a weather bulletin for “reported severe mountain wave reported 30 miles north of Beatty VOR between FL290 and FL 330.” We are at 33,000 only 60 miles north of this area. I look ahead and using the Heads Up Display (HUD –a thick chunk of Lucite I stare through with pretty images displayed inside like all my instrument indications as well as the horizon line) I can see the layer of clouds extending across our path like a gigantic caterpillar. The cloud tops are slowly undulating and we will be right in these tops at this altitude. I ask ATC for higher and they grant us FL350. We climb and level just as we pass over the northernmost edge of the layer. I ask Randy if he has ever heard of or encountered “severe wave” and he says no. Me either. We coast along getting very light nibbles of chop until we are over Las Vegas. It’s too late to do cabin service so I call the ladies and tell them to plan on a quick pick-up of trash just before landing. I advise the folks we are past the bumps but we are about to start our descent momentarily. The FASTEN SEATBELT sign has been on the entire one hour and thirty minute flight. No one complains.
We land in PHX and drive to our gate. The oncoming crew is advised of the weather out west. They will fly to San Diego, Oakland, and then Seattle. The FA’s will work until Oakland where the weather is finally calming down –until the next storm arrives the next morning. The oncoming Captain makes another impromptu Boeing endorsement. “Gotta love Boeing. These things are tanks” he remarks with a smile. We head home for a relaxing New Years Eve having done our work in the air travel system.
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