So here I am, right out of flight school. I got maybe 250 flight hours total, with hardly any instrument time to speak of and even less actual bad weather flying. My father ran a business in Connecticut and one day he needed to send two guys to Watertown NY. Would I like to fly them? You bet! So I rented a Cessna 172 from the local airport and on the appointed day I met the two men at the small terminal. The weather wasn't too bad, but the forecast was for a bad snow storm coming in from the west. If everything went according to schedule, we'd leave Watertown just ahead of the storm. So off we went, enjoying a nice ride up over Connecticut and New York state to our destination. While they were in town I checked the weather constantly. No computer weather service back then, all I could was call a government employee at the Flight Service Station (FSS) who would give me a weather briefing. More like a weather bashing. The storm was moving faster than expected, and the two guys I flew up there were taking longer than expected. Finally, at the last possible moment they showed up and off we went towards Hartford.
As we flew along the airways (no GPS then either) it had gotten quite
cloudy and quite bumpy. We cruised at about 125 kts, but our ground
speed was around 60. The weather was getting worse and the guy next to
me says "Christ! The cars down there are passing us!" Finally, as we crawled past Utica I gave it up and decided to land there rather than press on. I knew my limitations and I was maxed out. We landed on a very snow-covered airport where high winds threatened to overturn the little airplane. Once I got it parked they went inside, rented a car and drove the rest of the way. I went to a cheap motel to wait out the storm. The next day the weather seemed to be clearing and the FSS guy was saying the worst was passing Hartford now and should be fine by the time I get there, so I got the Cessna ready and took off for home. The closer I got to Hartford, the lower the ground speed, the weather was worsening and the turbulence was crazy bad. No autopilot so I was just fighting this thing every second. I crawled past Albany, then slower and slower towards Hartford, the weather getting worse and worse. Now all I wanted to do was just get this stupid thing on the ground. I didn't have time to get sick, because it was so rough I was getting downright scared. I focused on flying, working very hard to keep it pointed in the right general direction. Not Easy! Hartford Approach Control vectored me for the only approach there, a VOR approach from the south. This meant crawling my way down south with a ground speed of about 35 knots. He tried to turn me inbound once but quickly turned me back, the wind was just too strong. I'm looking at the approach plate as best I can, what with everything flying about the cockpit. I'd been getting beat up hard for well over three hours now. I was physically exhausted, scared to death and I knew when I turned inbound I'd have this enormous tailwind that would make the approach last only a couple of minutes. I decided I'd descend down until I saw the ground, minimums be damned! Approach control turned me inbound, I picked up the approach course more or less, descended down at a very good rate and saw the ground in plenty of time. Flash down the runway, crank it around to final, drop full flaps and touchdown at about walking speed. It wasn't over yet. I still had to get to the tie down before this windstorm flipped me over. Holding the controls this way and that way, I taxied slowly to parking, shut the engine off and tied it down quickly. With hardly a word I dropped off the keys, drove home, went into my bedroom and sat there having a serious discussion with myself about whether I really wanted to keep doing this. The next day I finally decided I had too much invested in this, it couldn't be this bad all the time, so I'd keep at it. For now. Since then I've been in a lot of similar weather in a lot of different airplanes. I still get nervous, but I never got really scared again. I know now what to do to get through it and would focus on that. Mostly I just get mad. When the turbulence gets really bad, my Navy sailor language returns, because I can't believe I got myself into this again.
