Saturday, September 13, 2008

Hurricane Ike Watch



I woke up a few minutes ago here in Denver and checked my Blackberry as I do every morning to see if the company added or made any changes to our trips. There two new trips for tonight. The plan is to reposition from Denver, CO to Lubbock, TX at 7:30pm, then depart Lubbock with two passengers at 11:00pm and arrive in Dallas around 12:15am.

I just completed the flight planning and noticed that the winds in Dallas are at our arrival time are predicted to be 20-30kts (23-34 mph) which are being caused by the wake of Hurricane Ike. The Piaggio handles wind better than any other plane I have flown and these winds fall well within the safety limits set for our airplane, in fact when I was flying the Grand Canyon, we would have weeks where we would routinely land in winds at least this strong.

The first image is a screen capture of our intended route (red line) from Lubbock (left) to Dallas (right). You can see that the outer wall of Ike is touching Dallas this morning, however, as you can see in the second image, Ike is predicted to turn to the northeast in a few hours.

We will have to keep an eye on the Hurricane (no pun intended) as it makes it's course over Texas.

2 comments:

Jason said...

I was going to tell you to give me a call when you get to Dallas..... Until I saw what time you get here.

Fraclife said...

This trip actually got canceled a few hours after I posted this. We need to go to Papa's BBQ next time I'm in town though!