It was one of those lousy winter nights in the upper Midwest. Every year, at the beginning of winter and at the end of winter, there comes two storms that are especially nasty. I must be a hard luck case, because every year I managed to find myself flying in them.
This night began innocently enough. It was just twilight in late winter. Myself and my copilot Chris were sitting in the cockpit waiting for the passengers. All preparations were completed, so we tuned the ADF radio to the local AM radio station where we heard The Doors playing Break On Through To The Other Side. I started wondering aloud if Marvin had done that, broke through to the other side. Marvin was a friend who had recently crashed and died. Our deep thought discussion ended when the first people began climbing the stairway, so off with the radio and on to the before start checklist. To the west you could see a few clouds, but nothing much. A USAir pilot joined us on the jumpseat, a small seat between us.
We took off from Minneapolis and turned south for Mason City, our first stop, 35 minutes away. We asked for and got 4000' as a final altitude. This would allow us to go directly to Mason City as we would not be interfering with all those other planes headed in to Minneapolis above us. Minutes after takeoff we entered the clouds. Immediately we began to get tossed about violently as we pushed through these thick clouds laden with heavy snow. All the anti-ice and deice were on but it still struggled to keep up with the accumulation. The turbulence was so bad the autopilot wouldn't stay engaged at all. I had two hands on the control wheel, and I wasn't flying, I was fighting the weather constantly. The turbulence tossed us every way except straight ahead and constant, forceful corrections were being applied by me. This will wear you out fairly quickly, but we had a ways to go still and so all I could do was struggle on. I thought those poor passengers, they must be scared to death in this. The wind was fierce and we got vectored around to the ILS approach. To say the approach was less than perfect is an understatement. Like I said, I wasn't flying, I was fighting it constantly. We got the runway in sight, landed and taxied in. With one engine left running, we dropped off a few passengers and some bags, then fired up and taxied back out. Now it was Chris's leg. In these extreme conditions I would normally not let a rookie fly, but Chris was an experienced first officer and good at what he does. So he took over the fight on our flight to Fort Dodge. "Damn!" he cursed as he fought the controls, trying to keep it somewhat on course and altitude. Wham. Wham! WHAM! It was a short flight to Ft Dodge and we flew the ILS approach there too. At minimums we got the runway in sight, sort of. The wind was a very strong crosswind from the left with a lot of snow falling and just as much snow blowing across the runway. The runway itself was covered in snow, and in the very limited visibility all we could see were some runway lights stretching out into the darkness ahead. Chris fought it down to the runway and did a terrific job of moving into a slip, left wing down, lots of right rudder to get us aligned. He put the left main gear on, then the right main and then the nose, right in the touchdown zone. I was greatly excited at this great show of airmanship, except that at this moment Chris apparently decided he'd had enough of this fight and took his hands off the controls. Instantly the plane weathervaned about 30 degrees to the left while starting to slide off to the right. (Note: Weathervaning is when a strong crosswind pushes on the big tail in the back and tries to turn you around into the wind). Hands and elbows were flying everywhere! "Grab the wheel! Grab the wheel!" I yelled, as I grabbed the rudder with my feet, the nosewheel steering with my left hand and the power levers with my right hand. Chris cranked the wheel hard left while I crabbed even more and added some power to stop this skid that was well developed and sending us right up by the right edge of the runway. Slowly we came back to the centerline (if you could see it. Everything was covered in blowing snow), I went to reverse thrust with more reverse on the right side to counteract the weathervaning. Still doing around a hundred knots we were back under control, sort of. We slowed down, crept to the taxiway and taxied to the ramp. As I turned left on the ramp the wind grabbed the vertical stabilizer and slowly spun us around the the left, until we stopped more or less where we were supposed to be. Damn! I shut down the left engine and turned off the seatbelt sign. The USAir guy said "They don't pay you guys enough!" and left. We sat there, kinda panting heavily, still wide-eyed over what had happened. Then Chris says slowly, "I am not yet ready to break through to the other side." I replied "Me neither, brother!"
The next and final leg was to Sioux City and we were empty on this leg. As we taxied back out, I just followed the tracks we had left in the snow. "I want to see how close we came to the edge," I said. "OK, but be careful! Don't drive this thing off the runway." We followed the tracks down the runway and what we saw was an eye opener. The right main tires had exited the runway between two runway lights, run parallel for several lights, then came back on the runway between two more lights. Meanwhile, the nose wheel and left main tracks had crossed, considerably. That's how sideways we had gotten. Man were we lucky we didn't hit an edge light. We fought that thing all the way to Sioux City, landed, shut down. As we were leaving I asked the flight attendant "Hey Michelle, how much are these little bottles of liquor?" "Five bucks," she replied. I put a five on the galley counter, grabbed two cups and split the little bottle into two shots of whiskey. I handed one to Chris and we both said cheers and drank the whole shot. Michelle watched us and said "I probably don't want to know what that was about, do I?" "No, no you don't," I answered. Later that night the heavy wet snow turned into heavy rain and washed all the traces of our little excursion in Ft Dodge away.
