Day 18: Camden, SC

Day 18: June 17th, Camden, SC. This morning, we tried to get an early start so that we'd avoid the potential for thunderstorms, a common threat in the South during this time of year. I had a flight plan filed for 8am, but we didn't make it off the ground until 8:50am. We said our goodbyes to our gracious hosts, the O'Briens. The kids once again came out to the airplane to bid farewell to their Uncle Matt and new uncle Joel. Again, the flight was IFR and we climbed up into the clouds upon our departure from Ashland, VA. This was to be another groundbreaking flight for me.

If there is one thing this trip has done for me, it has made me a more competent and confident pilot. While I earned my IFR rating in 2000, I rarely flew in actual IFR conditions, in the clouds. What many people don't realize is that flying in clouds is a completely different type of flying altogether. Not only do you need to train your brain to ignore your own sense of balance and rely solely on the instruments, you also navigate and approach airports using completely different rules than when you are flying visually in good weather. It has only been within the last 2 years that I began to hone my instrument flying skills and fly in instrument conditions. In fact, it was in August, 2007 that I received an Instrument Proficiency Check (IPC) which requalified me to fly IFR. Since that time, I began filing IFR and flying instrument approaches to airports whenever I could. Even so, before I began this trip, I had only accumulated a total of 7.7 hrs in "actual" instrument conditions, where I was actually inside of a cloud. The groundbreaking nature of this flight was that of the 2.9hrs of flight time for this particular flight, 2.4 hrs was in actual instrument conditions. It was the longest time I've spent hand-flying an airplane in actual instrument conditions. It was truly nice to have a copilot who could help flip through the charts and help navigate.

We do not have the ability to see Nexrad radar on-board during the flight, so we need to rely on our weather briefing before the flight and obtain verbal updates enroute from a flight service station (FSS) on the radio. On this flight, we were flying through some rain and clouds, which I'm now quite comfortable with, but the threat of possible convective activity (thunderstorms) ahead, we put down in Cheraw, SC to reevaluate the weather before pressing on to Camden, SC. We both felt that this was a good in-flight decision since FSS indicated that there were thunderstorm cells near Camden. We took on 10 gallons of fuel at Cheraw and checked the weather on the computer. Matt had brought along his Verizon air card, so we had Internet access to our laptops wherever we went, whether there was Wi-Fi available or not. This came in handy here at Cheraw, as there was no weather computer or Wi-Fi available at the FBO.

Since it was now later in the day and the possibility of thunderstorms was increasing, we decided to finish the final leg of the day, from Cheraw to Camden, by flying VFR. We flew low at 1500 feet, but this kept us VFR, outside of the clouds, which gave us the capability of seeing any thunderstorms or torrential rain that might erupt along our route. If we were to continue IFR in the clouds, then we would have to rely on air traffic control to navigate us around any severe weather and their primary responsibility is keeping aircraft separated, not providing weather. This was the safest way to complete the short 40 mile flight. At 1500 feet, we were close the cloud bases, but we could easily see that we were not going to encounter any severe weather on this leg. We landed at Camden and toured the hangars there while we waited for a ride.

We were there visiting Matt's brother Steve and his family. Steve's wife Cathy picked us up at the airport and brought us to Enterprise, where we rented a car for the day. Steve and Cathy were in the process of moving to Germany and they had movers coming at the exact time we'd be leaving the next day, so it made sense to have our own car so that we could depart in the morning. An early departure is vital so that we wouldn't run into thunderstorms in FL, which would comprise the next leg of our journey. We all went out for Mexican and then I spent the balance of the evening staying up way too late upgrading my iPhone to the new 3.0 operating system. It does have some new nifty features and was worth the upgrade, but staying up until 2am playing with computers makes 7am a rude awakening. It would be a short stay in SC, we were on to FL the next morning.