Cheat -ed / -ing on return

With a warm front stretching from Atlantic City to Danville, and a strong low in the midwest the weather was less than ideal when I got to the KORH airport to come home. The reported weather was OVC007, strong winds on the surface and enroute (40-60 knots forecast), and wind shear on the TAF. After a lengthy study of the weather computer and chat with flight service, it looked like I could fly to Trenton (TTN). The flight plan I pre-filed the day before was completely out the window.

Once the tower found the new flight plan, I got a full route clearance to TTN, and taxiied to rwy 29. The clearance was runway heading, vectors ORW v16 DIXIE v276 RBV KTTN, 3000, expect 6000 in 10. I started messing with the weather pages in the G1000 again - big mistake. More on that later.

There was a good bit of turbulence in the climb, but nothing outrageous. Cleared up to 6000 and heading 250, I cleared the clouds at 5000 feet. Total IMC time, like 5 minutes maybe. Cheated. I was eventually cleared south to ORW. Arriving north of ORW, the clouds faded and by the time I hit the LI Sound, skies were clear above, and below. Over Long Island I saw a few distant flashes of activity to the West-Northwest. When I asked NY approach about any weather, the response was - nothing apparent anywhere.

The reason I had to ask NY about the weather, despite having XM Weather on the G1000, was that I had managed to turn it off. There is a "Done" softkey on the AUX page. This should be relabeled the "kill" key - it effectively disables the data link function. Upon further study of the purpose of that button, there is no information on what it does, except to denote its use when first activating the system. So, at a time when weather would have been nice to have, I had none.

But then, I really didn't need it. The trip to TTN was very uneventful. I landed, got self-serve fuel, refiled, and reviewed the weather. With the radar trend showing a slot opening up west of JYO, it looked like a very doable flight. All that and a phone call to Mike to discuss the G1000 WX problem, I was on my way within about 30 minutes. The fuel farm is to the left rear of the FBO building when pulling up. I will remember that as TTN is a good stop.

Departing runway 24, I called Phili approach to activate IFR. The tower had closed. After a few minutes, I was cleared to JYO via direct MXE v408 ROBRT AML JYO at 6. Phili had me hold at 5000 as can be seen in the Flightaware track log.

It was definitely a bumpy flight and the log shows the horrendous ground speeds. As such other traffic was overtaking me once cleared to 6000, so I was assigned 7000, but given direct JYO - hard to beat that. I flew through one rain shower and the autopilot fought with the turbulence with occasional excursions through 20 degrees of bank and one chart flipping jolt.

For this flight though, I had full weather again and just monitored the radar images. Cheating. It was clear VMC for the whole trip with ceilings at about 8 or so. 44 miles and still 30 minutes from JYO, I had the beacon in sight. With 405 total flight hours as of this trip, I have still not had a weather scenario occur that convinces me that cockpit weather is as valuable as it costs. My thinking is that if it becomes a necessity while in flight, something is wrong with the pre-flight planning process. Yes, weather changes quickly and often, but at most GA airspeeds, it's not that much change. Maybe there is some regional weather variable to this.

As usual for a late night flight, I cancelled IFR once firmly planted on runway 17. 1.8 hours from TTN to JYO - 147 miles - or an avg gs of 82kts. Yikes!