Now this leg of the journey proved to be a quite challenging flight. It began early in the morning on a fog laden KOKC airport. I could see less than the full runway through the fog. I knew that I would break out of the ground layer at around 1200 feet. It was eerie to take off and in the first 10 feet of the take off to be surrounded by IMC fog.
This leg of the journey took 6 hours and and 52 minutes. Five hours and 45 minutes were dodging storm clouds and lightening…it was fun…that means I flew 5 hours 45 minutes of IMC. The distance was 1105 NM or 1271 miles.
It was fun as I dodged the storm cells looking at my Stormscope and Nexrad weather instruments. The air controllers caught on and said what are you flying? I told them it was a T182T and they came back with you have to have something more in that plane. I then informed them I had long range tanks, weather gear, oxygen, etc. They couldn’t understand what a Cessna 182 was doing up at 19,000′ flight level 190. They wanted to know if I was a pressurized aircraft.
NO, I said, I’m just sucking up a lot of oxygen…then I told them I was off to fly the North Atlantic. They asked for my website to follow me…again, that put a smile on my face. I knew I was off to do something special.
As I approached KPNE Northeast Philadelphia airport, it was surrounded by thunderstorms and they asked if I would like a visual onto the runway, as they thought they could radar vector me between the storms…NOT!
They dropped me to 2000′ where they thought I could see the runway for a visual approach…not to be…I saw the runway for a mere 3 seconds and then I was back in the clouds bouncing all over the place. The approach controllers said they would vector me over Willow Grove, PA for sequencing. I informed them that fuel was getting low so they vectored me to the ILS approach. I popped out of the clouds at around 500 feet of the runway and made a nice landing in the rain.
My cousin Mark was waiting for me and we spent a lovely afternoon in Philly eating cheese steaks and pork sandwiches. Then I met up with my friend Mark Karpo and his lovely wife Angel for authentic Chinese dinner.
In the morning I was off to pick up Don Ratliff in Charleston, South Carolina for the beginning of the North Atlantic journey.