Having gotten over the failure to launch on Halloween weekend I’m heading to Bangkok for a few days. Flying with a decent crew; Jim is a pretty superb Captain, he misses the odd thing but so do I and sure that’s why there are two of us.

 

We had talked about the chances of thunderstorms or CBs, that’s “cumulonimbus clouds” to the uninitiated, on arrival in Bangkok. We discuss bad weather all the time and it rarely results in anything of significance, but knowing my current run of luck it could go tits-up real quick.

 

I use the flight to plan my upcoming trip to New York aka NYC aka The Big Apple etc. The guys and myself are heading to UFC 205. I’m a huge Conor McGregor fan! I’m super distracted doing it and totally failing to complete my tasks and I forget to get the arrival weather for our destination until the very last-minute. This turns out to be a small problem when it becomes apparent that thunderstorms are present at the airfield and causing chaos for arrivals.

 

Jim in his absent-mindedness hasn’t been keeping an eye on my poor airmanship and between the two of us we have managed to make the whole thing messier than a FBI email investigation. He starts to get super stressed when he realises that we could be up shit creek without some paddles.

 

What we don’t want to do is screw up with our fuel, but given the headwind we flew into on the way was stronger than the Viagra induced hard on I got on Halloween, we could be in trouble.

 

Our decision-making is rushed and in honesty if Jim had kept an eye on me rather than letting me piss about with my NYC Big Apple plans, we may have done a better job. In the rush I calculate our fuel required to go to our alternate and he goes through how much holding time we will have.

 

Given I’ve managed to screw up the entire process already Jim should probably have checked my fuel figures, but he’s so stressed he forgets. We are also unable to hold in one place due to the proximity of giant CBs that are causing some fairly significant turbulence.

 

Decision time

 

When we look at the figures we realise that it’s probably much tighter than we had evaluated. Now, I may have crunched some of the numbers but I didn’t sign for the airplane so I’m laying the blame at his door. Either way, we nearly screwed up and we are time limited in whatever path we chose.

 

As the queue for landing starts to reduce and airplanes start to land we decide that the safest option at this point is to land at destination and declare it as our alternate. This is a pretty standard decision-making procedure that allows us to use our fuel for alternate to hold at destination.

 

On the final approach a CB starts to encroach on our track. It’s a beast, and it is all red and magenta on our radar, the wind is picking up in association with it and we have a heavy, turbulent crosswind.

 

In case I hadn’t mentioned it before now, I’m the pilot flying…

 

With the crosswind hammering us, and the CB getting closer to our track, I let the autopilot do the work down to minimums. When I disconnect we get a wing drop that I expertly manage to pick up and keep us flying toward the touchdown point. At landing I just smash it on without de-crabbing the airplane. I can imagine old people down the back looking for their teeth afterwards, but it was definitely the safest option in that weather.

 

I am not going to lie, I worked my ass off to make that a sweet approach and landing and I wish I had a GoPro to capture me at my best.

 

High fives all ‘round

 

LJ